Having bristled at the sexist treatment of other girls at her high school, as well as finding a box of her mother’s old zines and collages and writings, Vivian decides to release her own anonymous zine, calling out the sins of the patriarchy as embodied by the popular jocks and other douchebags. Her daughter may be following in her footsteps. And in her younger years, the character thumbed her nose at the establishment and favoured bands like Bikini Kill, who were central to the “riot grrrrl” movement of the early 1990s. Poehler didn’t have a hand in the script, which was written by Tamara Chestna and Dylan Meyer, but she does play Vivian’s mother in the film. Vivian ( Hadley Robinson) is probably how Poehler imagined herself as a teenager. You can celebrate what Moxie is trying to do while still recognising its failure to do it. Just because every white male studio executive is now trying to kowtow to his most woke critics, though, does not mean that female empowerment itself needs to become a bland, dismissible motivation for making a movie. Female empowerment has itself become sort of a conventional goal for mainstream films, as more and more films strive to be progressive on gender representation, and all other types of representation. That’s a shame, because the movie’s message of female empowerment deserves an approach that is far less conventional. As a filmmaker, though, Poehler doesn’t have the same effervescence that either the 1940s newspaper editor compliment, or the old soft drink, once had. She’s got moxie as a performer, particularly her character Joy from Inside Out, who was moxie incarnate. Moxie is the second film Poehler’s directed after her first film for Netflix, Wine Country, which didn’t have much moxie either. Oh, it’s supposed to mean all those things, but in Poehler’s hands, it’s too limp and facile.
#MOXIE FILM MARCIA GAY HARDEN MOVIE#
What it isn’t is a particularly good descriptor for Amy Poehler’s new Netflix movie that bears its name. (It’s also the name of a defunct American soft drink that tastes halfway between root beer and dirt, but that’s not important right now.) You might have heard it in an old black-and-white movie, where some grizzled newspaper editor told a young reporter “You got moxie, kid.” “Moxie” is a now-antiquated term that refers to a certain enlivening spark some people have, which causes them to assert themselves, challenge the status quo, and generally bring energy and unpredictability to anything they do.