What threatened to be a poor man’s, er poor woman’s, er poor person’s Mean Girls turned out to be a feminist anthem on its own with hints of Mean Girls thrown in, like a wine that reminds you of lilacs or an insurrection that reminds you of White Supremacy. Amy Poehler took the director’s chair once again and this time aimed a little higher than she did in Wine Country; she also, dare I say? hit closer to the bullseye.
Moxie wastes little time in getting to the issue at hand. Perhaps not every high school has a published “list” where the football team essentially rates all of their female classmates according to –essentially- how easily they can be ogled/abused, but don’t kid yourself; if your high school has a football team, this has been done in some form or another at least once. The difference here is the Trump understanding: a powerful white male fears no retribution because accountability is for other people.
The crux of the film’s thesis begins in high school homeroom where a frustratingly do-nothing teacher (Ike Barinholtz) “guides” a class discussion on The Great Gatsby. The new kid, Lucy (Alycia Pascual-Peña),
–a student of color- immediately objects to the assignment claiming Gatsby is an outdated tribute to whiteness and privilege. She’s not wrong. But the debate is immediately hijacked by star QB Mitchell (Patrick Schwarzenegger) who doesn’t especially care about Lucy’s opinion, but does care a lot about asserting his whiteness and privilegeness. Their exchange leads to exactly one thing: as an opinionated and strong female, Lucy now has a target on her back. With the self-righteous assholery of Trump himself, Mitchell makes it a point of putting Lucy in her place for having the audacity to contradict him.
The film exaggerates slightly in the events that follow, but only slightly, and I’ll forgive it because we know too many examples of men who have beaten the rap in the #MeToo era. The football team publishes a female-oriented and very-demeaning “awards” list –which includes specific female body parts—the school ignores the clamor from the women who know this is beyond-the-pale misogyny and the winner of “Most Docile,” Vivian (Hadley Robinson) decides docile isn’t gonna play this year. As this slowly becomes Vivian’s film, we watch her sway public opinion by releasing an anonymous self-published scandal rag she’s entitled “Moxie.”
This is one of those films I wish didn’t have to be made, but anyone who doubts that misogyny isn’t alive and well right now need 
look no further than the careers of Donald Trump and Andrew Cuomo. While the film is clearly reading into a Mean Girls format, Moxie evolves into more of a feminist and LGBTQ anthem. It is only too easy to see how the star of the football team owns and wields privilege like a Fox host promoting the Big Lie. And who will call him on it? The teachers? The principal? The parents? The locals? The student body? I love that while the story is really about Mitchell, the focus of the film is entirely on Vivian and Lucy. Mitchell is irrelevant, really. There is always going to be another BMOC who claims privilege he doesn’t deserve. That’s as American as stories get; what there isn’t always is someone without privilege to risk what little they have to right the societal wrong.
Moxie was a little on the heavy-handed side and resolved a little too cleanly. In fact, this is one of those films which ends conveniently at the peak of the feminist uprising. You just know that if you return to the high school a week later, maybe Mitchell gets his due. Maybe. More likely than not, however, the power struggle in the school hasn’t changed hands. If you’re willing to bend over for an awful football team, it matters not who represents it, does it? And if the feminists thought their movement could only be underground before, when does that change, if ever? A group of football fans doesn’t magically turn into a group of women’s soccer fans overnight no matter what information they’re presented. We know this from watching politics from 2016 to 2020. I liked this film, but I find myself liking the idea of Moxie much more than the film itself.
♪Moxie
You know you’re a cute aggravator
And a stirring truth instigator
I want to take you (to) home-room
I just downloaded Chrome, yeah
Our dean is Peter Principal Syndrome, syndrome
Moxie Lady♫
Rated PG-13, 111 Minutes
Director: Amy Poehler
Writer: Tamara Chestna and Dylan Meyer
Genre: Do you want to understand your teen daughter or not?
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: Feminists
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: The kind of creep who categorizes women according to screw-ability
♪ Parody Inspired by “Foxy Lady”
