In fairness, Moxie is not for us. It's for teenagers and if I had teens I would be excited for them to watch this film over the usual nerd-girl-turns-hot-girl-by-removal-of-glasses premise that seemed to be fairly omnipresent in the 80s and 90s. This film clearly has a reverence for the teen genre of that era, the John Hughes classics and beyond. It's rampant with all the usual tropes: the hot cheerleader, the jock, the secretly hot but inexplicably unpopular female protagonist, the high school heart-throb et al, but all given a 2021 update.
The central premise of the film is that 16-year-old Vivian (Hadley Robinson) starts an anonymous feminist zine called Moxie, to take aim at the misogynistic culture of her high school. The zine becomes a movement and the girls of Rockport High School effectively say, "We're mad as hell and we're not going to take it anymore."
Heart-throb Seth, played by Nico Hiraga, is an Asian skater who is down for the cause (meaning feminism) and is not the usual overtly confident pursuant in the love story. He stumbles when it comes to the couple's first kiss and he's the one who puts on the brakes when things are getting hot and heavy. He had me swooning inappropriately given our age differential.
Moxie isn't subtle. It's fairly predictable. There's almost no subtext. It hands you a feminist tome bundled up in a shiny high school dramedy and screams, "We've flipped the script and we've moved with the times." To us middle-aged folk, it's heavy-handed and Greg felt that it talked down to its teen and tween audience. Hogwash. It's a perfect teen romp for the 12-16 age bracket.
I do wonder if I enjoyed this film more than Greg because I'm a woman and it's a girl-power narrative. When was the last time he was moved to tears because his team, the ones who'd been systematically oppressed and objectified, triumphed together and felt hope? The closest he has probably ever been to feeling that way was the 2011 Rugby World Cup. I guess being the benefactor of the patriarchy has some downsides.
HE SAW
The central question we fell upon at the end of the heavy-handed piece of moralising that is Moxie, was: "Should we be reviewing movies for teens?" and the natural follow up: "To what standard should we hold them?"
These questions were raised immediately upon the conclusion of the movie when I told Zanna my feelings, which seemed to aggravate her. She said, "Well, I liked it," I suspect from spite but there was no way to be sure, because her feelings toward the film at that point were too mixed up with her feelings towards me.
She said, "It's a movie for teens and you've got to view it that way."
I said: "Then we probably shouldn't be reviewing movies for teens."
She said: "We've reviewed lots of movies that aren't aimed at us. Why should a movie for teens be any different?"
I thought she probably had a point there but I argued with it, to avoid being seen as wrong.
Moxie's central problem, I think, is architectural: Like trying to hide cat medicine in Jellimeat, the film-makers appear to have started with the moral and attempted to build a believable world around it, with the result that the whole thing feels corny and overbearing.
The premise is that a girl is awakened to the reality of the patriarchy and begins a zine and a zine-based society, dedicated to taking it down. The message, a call to arms for all of us, on behalf of girls and women, is a good and important one, but I'm pretty sure teens are smart enough to see directly through all that Jellimeat and go, "Ugh, cat medicine", then head off to their rooms to read moral philosophy and take drugs.
I expounded at length on all this Jellimeat-teen-resistance stuff but the more I went on, the more rigid I sensed Zanna's position becoming. The centrepiece of my argument was that telling young people what to think is a surefire way to turn them against you. In retrospect, it's not just young people.
Moxie is streaming now on Netflix.
