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Movie Review: 'Moxie'

Amy Poehler and Netflix team for some girl power comedy.

By Sean PatrickPublished 3 years ago 5 min read
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Girl power narratives are becoming more frequent in modern popular culture and I am here for it. It’s great to see the long held trope of ‘boys will be boys’ repeatedly upended by smarter, more capable and more interesting female characters. Now that you’ve cursed me for supposed virtue signaling, and we’ve weeded out those who’ve come here hoping to read a review repeatedly dunking on Moxie, we can actually talk about Moxie.

Moxie stars Hadley Robinson as Vivian, a bookish 16 year old whose happy to just keep her head down and get through the school year alongside her best friend, and fellow wallflower, Claudia (Lauren Tsai). Vivian’s perspective shifts with the arrival of a new girl in school. Lucy (Alycia Pascual-Peña) immediately does not fit in at the school. For one thing, she will not put up with the school jock, Mitchell Wilson (Patrick Schwarzenegger) who takes an immediate dislike to her.

Everyone who has ever known Mitchell knows he’s a jerk but because he’s handsome and the Quarterback of the football team, he’s been allowed to be as horrible as he pleases. When Lucy refuses to simply go along with his terrible behavior, Vivian gets inspired to side with her. Circumstances then conspire that lead Vivian to see other problems at the school, sexist shortcomings that she and others have just simply ignored for years. Now, she’s done just letting it go.

After one more last straw, Vivian goes home and pulls out her mom’s old records. Mom (Amy Poehler), may be an ice cream chugging suburbanite today, but in the 90’s she was a Riot Grrl, inspired to revolution in High School and college by the words of the band Bikini Kill. Listening to Mom’s punk records leads Vivian to create her own Zine, something denizens of the 1990’s may remember as pamphlet size newsletters.

Vivian is inspired to create Moxie, a zine aimed at exposing the sexist heart of her school. Anonymously stashing the Zine in the girls bathroom, Vivian’s creation becomes a phenomenon and inspires a group to come together for further action. Much of the first issue is dedicated to calling out the creation of a sexist list created by Mitchell and the rest of the football team. The list ranks women at the school and gives out such outrageous titles as ‘Most Bangable’ and ‘Best Ass.’

Moxie is a hit right away but, of course, complications must ensue. Vivian’s newly woke perspective overwhelms Claudia whose traditional Korean upbringing makes joining the revolution nearly impossible, thus dividing the friends who’ve been together since they were four years old. Then there is the school in general, embodied by Principal Shelly (Marcia Gay Harden), which has an ingrained social order that is not easy to push along with a simple message of progressivism.

Not all of Moxie works. For one thing, Marcia Gay Harden’s villainous Principal is a little underwritten. More could have been done to flesh out the Principal’s perspective. The clueless way in which Harden portrays the character feels like a shorthand intended to paper over how little thought was given to creating the character. Harden, of course, is not bad but the character and the story lets her down.

Sexual assault becomes an important plot point late in the movie and the film never earns the weight to deal with the subject properly. It’s a dramatic turn that derails the movie. I understand the desire to include it, but the movie needed to earn a level of seriousness first before launching into such an important topic. That, plus the character at the center of the sexual assault story is not a main character and is seemingly forced into the plot just so the movie can make a point about sexual assault.

Those issues aside, I still enjoyed Moxie and it’s aesthetic of empowerment. Amy Poehler as a director and storyteller has a very watchable style. Moxie is a pop movie with a pop aesthetic but one that is grounded in a serious message about the way we treat women from a very early age. Micro-aggression's such a man feeling entitled to touch a woman or a school that funds boys sports above girls sports, all add up over time to a culture of sexism that becomes a norm, a default setting, and by extension becomes intransigent.

Moxie has a story that takes on the task of recognizing microaggressions, calling them out and asking, if not for a complete change, a recognition, at the very least, about why such seemingly minor things add up to something larger and more all consuming. Moxie does a good job of crafting pop culture wokeness in a way that doesn’t leave you cringing at the earnestness or irked at the often preachy approach of so many failed pop culture attempts at wokeness.

In its way, Moxie is a lovely way to Trojan Horse serious conversations about the baked in sexism of American society in an accessible mainstream pop package. It’s a message more people need to get as not talking about it has gotten us to where we are, a place where men still regularly send women unsolicited pictures of their genitals and a country that still has a very serious problem discussing sexual consent. Moxie is not exactly the movie to have those serious conversations but like a Trojan Horse, it can smuggle those ideas into a larger context and in that way, it’s a valuable movie.

Moxie debuted on Netflix on March 3rd, 2021.

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About the Creator

Sean Patrick

Hello, my name is Sean Patrick He/Him, and I am a film critic and podcast host for the I Hate Critics Movie Review Podcast I am a voting member of the Critics Choice Association, the group behind the annual Critics Choice Awards.

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