Moxie Review: Not the Director of the Girl-Power Revolution Amy Poehler Craved

At one point in the new film directed by Netflix’s Amy Poehler Moxie, a group of teenagers gather in a private room during a party to vent about the stupid kids at their school. One of them shuffles a deck of cards, understanding on his face.

“Do you know what I just realized? The king is worth more than the queen, ”she says, with the air of someone who is discovering the greatest secrets in the universe. “Why? The queen is the best.”

That strangely planned wokeness swamp Moxie down, even if it’s a sweet and powerful movie about a girl gaining self-confidence to defend herself and her colleagues. Poehler and the writers try to balance a wide range of issues, but fail to integrate them significantly in the story. This sometimes makes Moxie it looks like a checklist of artificial social awareness.

[Ed. note: This review contains slight spoilers for Moxie.]

Based on a 2015 YA novel of the same name, Moxie follows the shy sophomore Vivian (Hadley Robinson), who is getting more and more fed up with her school’s sexist culture. Every year, a group of popular boys, led by football captain Mitchell (Patrick Schwarzenegger, who plays the role of charming asshole with an almost alarming subtlety), launches a ranking of female students, giving them degrading titles like “Most Resounding” “and” Best Rack. ” When the new student Lucy (Alycia Pascual-Peña) dares to speak against Mitchell, she ends up being criticized on the list. Fueled by this attack, and a Bikini Kill song that her mother (Amy Poehler) played for her at one point – Vivian spills all of her anger into a zine she calls “Moxie,” and spreads throughout her school.

The connection between Vivian randomly remembering the lyrics to “Rebel Girl” and finding her mother’s old stock of zines, and then creating her own zine, is tenuous. (Especially since she never really … talks to her mother about it.) But generally, it’s gratifying to see Vivian’s evolution from shy wall flower to leader encouraged by anonymity. As more students at the school – including boys – begin to understand the zine’s call to action, they draw Sharpie hearts and stars on their hands to signify solidarity. Soon, Moxie grows from an anonymous publication by a woman to a core group of students struggling for change. It is definitely refreshing to see a wide variety of girls included in the mix – and not just outsiders, like popular student Kaitlynn (Sabrina Haskett) and soccer captain Kiera (Sydney Park) participating as well.

Some individual parts of Moxiehowever, it just seems awkward and out of place. This line of queen and king is not the only awkward dialogue. Lucy complains that her assigned reading in English consists only of books by rich white guys – which may have more impact if the first episode of Netflix Original Ginny and Georgia it didn’t have a very similar scene, aired just a few weeks ago. There are also strange framing devices at the beginning – a nightmare that Vivian has to be unable to shout, as well as her strangely relevant question about college writing – that disappear immediately, only to be randomly referenced towards the end of the film.

But the film’s biggest disservice is how it has all the pieces in place to really examine intersectionality and instead ends up failing. At the end of the day, it’s more of a story about Vivian than about Moxie. Vivian never comes to a significant agreement with the fact that she inherently benefits from privileges that her friends do not: she is white, healthy and cisgender. She is surrounded by a diverse cast, but these characters don’t have their own agency – they are just in place to increase Moxie’s (and therefore Vivian’s) wokeness. Even in places where other characters take the lead, the film sticks to Vivian’s limited point of view: Moxie pits Kiera against Mitchell for a sports scholarship, but after the rush, the focus is not Kiera. It is about Vivian’s sadness and frustration, which she cashes in other characters, such as her new boyfriend (Nico Hiraga) and her mother.

Her relationship with her best friend Claudia (Lauren Tsai) shows this more directly. Unlike the other girls involved in Moxie, Claudia comes from a first-generation Chinese family – because her mother worked tirelessly for her education, Claudia feels immense pressure to succeed and cannot risk being suspended like Vivian. Vivian fails to realize this, although she and Claudia have been best friends all their lives, and she is increasingly frustrated with Claudia for not participating in Moxie’s most rebellious activities. Claudia eventually calls Vivian for her insensitive behavior, but Vivian never offers more than a murmured apology. At the end of the film, however, all tensions eased.

For MoxieTo give credit, Vivian’s selfish attitude ends up being addressed, but focuses specifically on how rude she is being to her mother. This could be a significant emotional thread, except that, for most of the film, their relationship is marginalized, only increasing in the end because of emotional catharsis. It is easier to fix a simple misunderstanding between mother and daughter – especially since Vivian was inspired by her mother’s rebellious days – than for the heroine to consider her own self-centeredness and make personal amends to her friends.

Poehler and filmmakers imbue Moxie with moments of triumph of the girls coming together, however, when trying to be more socially conscious, they end up not doing much with their diverse cast. Overall, however, the film is definitely positive: full of joyful moments of victory, sweet and specific character relationships and a unique character arc that is quite satisfying to watch unfold. That’s not the problem Moxie plays in bad tropes – mostly not. It’s just that Poehler and the team have all the pieces of something bigger and don’t assemble them in the way that would have the greatest impact.

Moxie and now streaming on Netflix.