Moxie, review: the only joke here is Amy Poehler’s idea of ‘inclusivity’
Dir: Amy Poehler. Cast: Hadley Robinson, Alycia Pascual-Peña, Lauren Tsai, Nico Hiraga, Patrick Schwarzenegger, Marcia Gay Harden, Sabrina Haskett, Sydney Park, Anjelica Washington, Josie Totah, Amy Poehler, Ike Barinholtz. 15 cert, 110 mins
At the Golden Globe Awards on Sunday night, hosts Amy Poehler and Tina Fey were both sporting an unconventional red-carpet look: a small cluster of hearts and stars, scrawled on their hands in black ink. These symbols, it transpires, are a secret sign of female solidarity in Moxie, a coming-of-age drama directed by Saturday Night Live veteran Poehler, about a feminist uprising at an American high school. Hashtag activism, meet viral marketing! These days you’re looking more and more alike.
Adapted from a 2017 young-adult novel by Jennifer Mathieu, Moxie unfolds at Rockport High: an anonymous suburban educational establishment where lecherous jocks such as Mitchell Wilson (Patrick Schwarzenegger, son of Arnold) rule the roost. Girls such as Vivian (Hadley Robinson) and her best friend Claudia (Lauren Tsai) keep their heads down and try their best to ignore the stiflingly sexist ambience, while privately dreading the publication of an annual social-media honours list featuring awards such as “most bang-able” and “best rack”. Meanwhile their headmistress, Principal Shelly, (Marcia Gay Harden) seems to have long ago adopted a strategy of wilful ignorance, and almost has a fit when a female pupil knocks on the door of her office to report Mitchell for harassment.
“Oop! There’s that word,” Principal Shelly trills, all a-fluster. “If you use that word, that means I have to do a bunch of stuff.” The pupil in question is Lucy (an excellent Alycia Pascual-Peña), whose family have relocated from a significantly more woke locale, and her refusal to stand for Mitchell and his cronies’ behaviour stirs Vivian’s latent rebel spirit. Inspired by a rummage through some old protest memorabilia belonging to her once-hip mother Lisa (played by Poehler herself), she produces an anonymous, rabble-rousing pamphlet called Moxie, encouraging her fellow students to take a stand against the misogynistic status quo. Lo and behold, the fire catches, and Moxie soon becomes a force to be reckoned with. Scribbled hearts and stars are just the start.
Poehler and her screenwriters, Tamara Chestna and Dylan Meyer, attack this material with the panicky zeal of grown-ups who are desperate to stress they’re down with the kids. There’s a knowing chuckle about the lack of “intersectionality” in Lisa’s activist days – they called their meetings “pow-wows”, obliviously committing the sin of cultural appropriation – but Moxie’s attempts at 21st-century-style inclusivity feel both strenuous and tokenistic.
Vivian’s social set is a hiply fragrant potpourri of minorities: one transgender pupil, one wheelchair user, two girls from mixed-race families, and so on. But the one thing they all have in common is their threadbare character arcs, with each turning out to be a mere wingwoman in their white friend’s great personal journey of self-actualisation.
You’d also hope a film this intent on parading its progressive credentials would have thought a bit harder before casting a young Asian actress as the timid, bookish, invisible-to-boys best friend, especially when in Mathieu’s novel, she was Latina. As for Seth (Nico Hiraga), Vivian’s hunky male classmate, here is a figure with a valuable lesson for any teenage boys watching at home: if you’re an “ally”, girls will want to sleep with you, even if fealty to the cause comes at zero personal cost.
A better film – or, frankly, just a more realistic one – might have at least gently interrogated Seth’s motives at some point. But who needs complexity, honesty, a sense of humour or visual flair when there are progressive points to be scored? Of course the answer is viewers, who have been spoiled for choice in recent years for sharp, hilarious and profound female-led teen movies: Booksmart, Rocks, Lady Bird, Easy A, Whip It, Girlhood, Blockers, Eighth Grade and Mean Girls (written by and starring Poehler’s longtime collaborator Fey) to name but a few. One hopes the golden age isn’t quite over yet, although as Moxie galumphs from one glib, soulless scene to the next, it’s hard not to fear the worst.
Available via Netflix now
