By Jake Wilson
MOXIE
Directed by Amy Poehler
Written by Tamara Chestna and Dylan Meyer
Netflix, 110 minutes, rated M
★★½
Even in an era where Hollywood movies are routinely loaded with often contradictory progressive messages, Moxie belongs to a species almost too rare to be called a sub-genre: a mainstream teen comedy-drama where feminism is explicitly the point.
To pull that off, it helps to be as widely liked as Amy Poehler, whose middle-American perkiness on camera has allowed her to get away with quite a bit, as the producer of the audacious sitcom Broad City and as co-creator of the even better time-loop series Russian Doll.
Hadley Robinson as Vivian, Nico Hiraga as Seth..Credit: Colleen Hayes/Netflix
Here Poehler is both director and producer, adapting a 2017 “young adult” novel by Jennifer Mathieu (the screenwriters are Tamara Chestna and Dylan Meyer). She also takes a supporting role as the breezy but strong-willed Lisa Carter, a single mother whose “riot grrl” youth inspires her daughter Vivian (Hadley Robinson) to launch an anonymous 1990s-style zine that becomes the talk of her Oregon high school.
This is a place that badly needs shaking up: where obnoxious jocks are treated as heroes, girls are rated on criteria such as “most bangable,” and teachers are no help at all, with the straitlaced principal (Marcia Gay Harden) actively hostile to complaint.
Even Vivian, as a self-identified introvert, remains unable to challenge the status quo except on paper – until the zine inspires some of her classmates to form a club that morphs into a schoolwide protest movement.
It’s a promising concept, somewhere between Pump Up The Volume and Gossip Girl, with Olivia Wilde’s similarly right-on teen comedy Booksmart supplying a recent comparison point. Perhaps surprisingly, the Wilde film has many more laughs – but that’s not Moxie’s main goal, and Robinson even in her mid-twenties is a credible teenage wallflower in a way that can’t be said of Wilde’s leads.
There are even intermittent efforts at style, including a lengthy tracking shot that follows Vivian and her best friend Claudia (Lauren Tsai) through a Hawaiian-themed house party: not exactly Scorsese, but a step up from Poehler’s 2019 directorial debut Wine Country, which felt like less a movie than a team-building getaway with Netflix footing the bill.
Moxie has its own strain of awkward didacticism, of a piece with the nerdily over-enthusiastic side of Poehler’s comic persona, which in itself can be endearing. The major issue is that she may have too forgiving a temperament for satire: it’s no accident she remains best-known for starring in the shrewdly cosy sitcom Parks and Recreation, built on the counterfactual question “What if politicians were nice people?”
The problems with tone become more glaring in the second half, which departs from the source material to comment more directly on America in the Trump era. You don’t have to squint too hard to see a resemblance between the circumstances of Brett Kavanaugh’s 2018 nomination to the US Supreme Court and the fracas that eventually surrounds school football captain Mitchell Wilson (Patrick Schwarzenegger, son of you-know-who), regarded as a shoo-in for a college scholarship.
Thus the film veers into territory much more harrowing than comic – and then has to veer straight back out again, in time to supply the target audience with a suitably upbeat, empowering finale.
It doesn’t help that the supporting cast members are given little more than a couple of notes to play, whether their characters are sympathetic or the reverse. Tsai has an efficient line in wordless reactions, used to convey the straitlaced Claudia’s increasing discomfort with her friend’s developing political consciousness.
Nico Hiraga (also seen in Booksmart) has less success as Vivian’s love interest Seth, a character effectively defined by the word “non-threatening”. An odd scene where the pair go on a date at a funeral parlour, carried over from the book, adds nothing but random quirk.
I am hardly the person to be calling out Poehler for insufficient wokeness, and there’s nothing strictly wrong with populating your right-on teen movie with a carefully “diverse” range of characters while still having everything revolve around the straight, white heroine.
But under these circumstances, there’s no hope of making the inevitable moment when Vivian in turn is called out for her privilege feel like anything more than a token gesture.