Netflix’s new high school movie, Moxie, broke the made-for-Netflix curse for me. Amy Poehler’s story about a group of girl’s (re-)discovery of female power advances the plots of some classic and touchstone films like Mean Girls (2004), movies that I saw and loved just on precipice of reviewing movies together here on this blog (some 200 reviews ago! congrats!) like Australian indie Girl Asleep (2015), Edge of Seventeen (2016, one of my favorites starring Hailey Steinfeld), Flower (2017, starring a foul-mouthed Zoey Deutsch), Thoroughbreds (also 2017, starring a young Anya Taylor Joy), Blockers (2018), A24’s delightful Never Goin’ Back (also 2018), and Booksmart (2019). We’ve spent a lot of time talking about movies that move the goal post and expand (or don’t) the type of stories that can be told about young women in high school (yearly plug/plea for Assassination Nation!?!) and middle school. This film shares much with its contemporaries while treading new ground. It does some work to make the cause of feminism more intersectional, by including gay, trans, black, Latinx, Asian folks, and people with disabilities.
It acknowledges the epidemic of sexual assault happening in our middle and high schools and the institutional inertia that’s preventing it from being resolved. It also recognizes the generational amnesia of women’s liberation movements, which I think is one of the major points of interest for the politics of the film. At any point, had Vivian been willing to communicate her problems at school with her woke, reformed punk rock mother, her mom would have given her a blue print for what to do, but as Poehler’s character says, “I don’t want you to be like me. I want you to be like you.” It would’ve come to easy. “That’s the worst thing you can say to someone. That’s such bullshit,” Vivian responds, at a loss for her what she values most.
Wife wants it known she thinks of this movie as a “charming feminist fairytale.” She says it’s hard to believe the quarterback’s level of villainy until you see the obverse side of the movie’s successes, as the sisterhood is able to make big inroads into the school. The fantasy of a cohesive female student body is part of the conceit of the film–what would be possible if girls stood up for one another, if they spent less time in their own heads and more time looking out for each other. I don’t mind that space of heightened reality if it means that we can get past some of the tropes of its cinematic forebears. Moxie isn’t (primarily) a movie about the discovery of sexuality and its discontents like Mean Girls, nor is it the grand drama of female friendship that is Booksmart.
Wife actually describes it as a kind of “Whistledown plot,” a send up to the Bridgerton series: girl creates a persona in order to exact justice and experiment with her sense of self. It’s also a movie about the maintenance of friendship: the scenes of Vivian and Claudia’s bond are some of the sweetest in the movie, and it’s early on that they encounter rough patches, but that rift is not the climax or focus on the film. The fact that their bond must be continually restored, repaired, re-centered through service is simply a fact of its existence. There is never any real danger in its disintegration, which, in a way, feels possible through the drama of Booksmart, a movie about growing apart. The nuance of their bond is implicit in small acts of devotion which doesn’t require soaring rhetoric or a quiet piano.
As a fellow INTJ, however, the level of emotional betrayal occurring in that transitional friendship period is one of the most compelling aspects of the movie. (The depiction of group chat and the absence of a name is so cutting in one excellent and emotionally complex scene: a moment of joy and exclusion that Anne Carson would term the “ricochet” in Eros the Bittersweet.) Wife says that Vivian and Claudia’s relationship and its initial challenge in the movie comes from this myth that girls are fed early on–that they have to find one and only one Best Friend who can be a container for everything else someone needs. This notion is challenged the moment that those two girls’ values come at odds with one another. The movie does a great job of navigating the (largely) cultural and personality challenges that divide them on burner activism at Rockport High. But it also gives Vivian a chance to branch out and grow into a bunch of friendships. It’s kind of cool how Claudia continues to play a big role in Vivian’s story as the story progresses, taking the fall, and urging her to be braver, connecting her mother with her big moment.
There are some moments of brilliance in Moxie: the single shot at the high school party with the slapstick humor is fabulous; the double plot with Vivian’s mother; depictions of men in different stages of understanding about how they contribute to the patriarchy. On that last point: Wife says, “you know that the quarterback is going to rape someone from the first time that the New Girl says, ‘He’s more than just annoying, he could really hurt someone.'” Nico Haraga/Shrimp/Hands is the consummate gentleman and comes off as just the perfect ally, has the dreamiest things to say about being ready, being in his own head, needing all the help he can get. (He also happened to be in Booksmart, for those keeping score.) The cheeky teacher’s appearances pay off and in dividends: his constant complaints about a lack of class time, his bumbling fumbling about how to address inequities in society, his subtle bias in affirming traditional responses from traditional students about the classic lit he has chosen.
(And just as a momentary aside, I want to suggest that The Great Gatsby is a book that we should all be able to get behind if we’re interested in representation, and that teaching against a book or bringing in different perspectives on a reading of a classic book can be powerful too. I get that it feels like a story “by a rich white man about rich white men” feeling feelings, but it’s based on a Silver Age Latin novel by Petronius–possibly a former slave?–called The Dinner of Trimalchio–also a former slave! And look, I know that having to take that many steps back to finally get to pop culture relevance is a bridge too far for some, but there’s a danger in oversimplifying a work of art just as much as there is in whitewashing its reading. Reasonable people can disagree about whether or not a 1920s adaptation of a satirical story written in Latin by a wealthy freedman can give a diverse classroom of American teenagers sufficient insight into their own culture. I just think if we’re going to have arguments about canon that we ought to target the right stories and think about end goals.)
Moxie is a gem. Go see it!
