Rebel girls make it all worthwhile
Amy Poehler’s ‘Moxie’ makes some missteps. Just focus on the self-empowered teens.
The retro-titled “Moxie,” based on the 2017 novel by Jennifer Mathieu, is a likable, well-performed and admirably inclusive, if not terribly deep, comedy about teen feminism. The film, directed by Amy Poehler from a script by Tamara Chestna and Dylan Meyer, should strike a chord with young women aware — or becoming aware — that they’re growing up in a system still flagrantly rigged against them more than 50 years after their grandmas began burning their bras.
Vivian (Hadley Robinson) is an earnest, hardworking high school junior living with her divorced mom, Lisa (Poehler), and joined at the hip with Claudia (Lauren Tsai), her bookish longtime BFF. But a series of unsettling events — a student poll that ranks Vivian “most obedient,” a baffling college essay question, and the arrival of provocative new classmate Lucy (Alycia Pascual-Peña) — inspires the 16year-old to imitate her mother’s riot-grrrl past and buck the school’s sexist status quo. Her move: She secretly publishes a feminist zine dubbed Moxie and unleashes a campus rebellion.
For maximum enjoyment, it’s perhaps best to simply accept that Vivian’s homemade publication (we don’t get to see much of what’s inside) is so spot-on in its criticism of school bias and so widely embraced by the female students that it has the strength to incite a movement, also called Moxie. Same goes for the notion that Vivian can hide her authorship for as long as she does.
It could also be asked why the concept of sexism is suddenly such an eye-opener to the Moxie crew when that annual student poll, which contains such undignified categories as “Best Rack” and “Most Bangable,” should have sparked serious blowback ages ago?
Still, it’s enjoyable and heartening to see the film’s array of increasingly enlightened teen girls — including athlete Kiera (Sydney Park); her forthright pal, Amaya (Anjelika Washington); transgender CJ (Josie Totah) and others — band together for the common goals of fairness, gender and racial equality, and sisterhood. A one-sided dress code gets an appropriate dressing down as well.
The story also helpfully touches on such related topics as white privilege, unconscious bias, ingrained misogyny and the toxicity of silence. A scene in which the introverted Claudia — who’s been slow to jump on the Moxie bandwagon (causing a predictable rift with Vivian) — explains the value of education in her Asian culture and the sacrifices her immigrant mother has endured makes one of the film’s better statements.
In addition, the movie smartly features Emily Hopper as Meg, a student who uses a wheelchair and displays an amusing take-noprisoners attitude toward her oblivious classmates.
Vivian and her Moxie mates’ lively journey to achieve full student-body and administrative acceptance of their vital ambitions may not pan out in the most sweeping or boldest ways, but progress — personal, social and societal — is definitely made.
Yet for all its energy and charm, this overlong film contains its share of undermining missteps. Topping the list are the weak portrayals of the story’s few adults, most notably Rockford High’s Principal Shelly (a misused Marcia Gay Harden), who is so clueless and absurdly dismissive she makes Eve Arden’s Principal McGee from “Grease” look like Gloria Steinem.
Ike Barinholtz is one-note as a vague English teacher, and Poehler skims the surface of Vivian’s laid-back mom.
Also troubling is the school’s handsome, superpopular jock, Mitchell (Patrick Schwarzenegger), a firstclass jerk who gets away with — and even rewarded for — his nasty, unabashedly chauvinistic behavior. Guys like him certainly abound, but Mitchell is such a one-dimensional trope, we learn little from his existence. When the tables finally turn on him due to a grave revelation that feels painfully under-explored, there’s no catharsis, just a check off a list.
On the upside, Robinson proves a breath of fresh air as she goes from self-effacing to self-empowered with naturalistic heart, verve and, yes, moxie. The other young actors, particularly Tsai, Pascual-Peña and Nico Hiraga as a dreamy skateboarder who steals Vivian’s heart, are also engaging talents.
Such Bikini Kill throwback tracks as “Rebel Girl” and “Double Dare Ya” have their day again here, plus there’s a fun on-screen performance by the L.A. teen/ pre-teen all-girl punk rock band the Linda Lindas.
Historical drama “The World to Come” has so much going for it — atmosphere, locations, situational tensions and performances — that its lingering diffuseness is puzzling, like a promised but undelivered rain for a well-laid seedbed.
The weight of seasons is a time marker of sorts for this 19th-century lesbian romance between neighboring pioneer wives played by Katherine Waterston and Vanessa Kirby, and in director Mona Fastvold’s stark, attentive movie, the interior weather is as fully expressed as the exterior kind. But in adapting short story maestro Jim Shepard’s tale of intense attraction bred in unforgiving isolation, the movie mistakes wordiness for worthiness and telling for showing.
Our window into this world as the icy new year of 1856 begins is through the highly literate, narrated thoughts of Waterston’s Abigail, an upstate New York farm wife who with her husband Dyer (Casey Affleck) is looking for a road back to meaningfulness after the recent death of their only daughter. She tracks her feelings and observations in a diary she views as an honest, from-the-heart corrective (“I have become my grief ”) to the numbers-driven farm ledger her morose, duty-minded spouse keeps.
In the absence of any marital reconnection beyond what is for her increasingly constrictive housewifery, Abigail finds healing friendship in vivacious new neighbor Tallie (Kirby), an outspoken thinker whose regular visits change the molecules in the air. For Tallie, the liberation in their bond is an escape from the controlling atmosphere generated by her stern husband Finney (Christopher Abbott), who wonders why she hasn’t produced a child yet. The women, meanwhile, understand that something new and breathtakingly alive is being created by their time together — the question is whether it can be nurtured in a setting practically choked by convention and burden.
Same-sex romances from long ago are nearly always defined by the fizz in what’s forbidden, and the setting here — rustic but constrained, with hilly, rugged expanses, anchored by JeanVincent Puzos’ transportive log-cabin production design — is no less powerful for the anticipation it creates for the unleashing of passion. But “The World to Come” suffers from baked-in obligation to the written word as both a literary adaptation (Shepard co-scripted with Ron Hansen) and diary-driven story dependent on narration. The result is a movie that can seem like a semi-dry tour of Abigail’s mind-set rather than an emotional journey performed by a topdrawer quartet of actors.
Initially, Abigail’s descriptive musings make sense — she’s processing a discouraging life. But Fastvold relies on it as a character shortcut and it can come across like an editing flub, as when Abigail narrates wanting to purchase an atlas, then says it out loud minutes later. She is not an unreliable narrator, either, so the sincerity of the running commentary competes for our attention instead of truly augmenting it.
That’s regrettable because when we get a full, breathing scene, Waterston and Kirby deliver plenty as women who would rather explore what their connection reveals than pretend they care anymore about their prescribed roles while Affleck and Abbott effectively prowl the sidelines like suspicious, wounded monitors. At its best, unencumbered by narration, “The World to Come” is as much a subtle portrait of two fractured marriages as it is an earnest glimpse of a rejuvenating union.
But those glimmers of insight have to peek through Fastvold’s conscious austerity, which is sometimes an evocative choice, sometimes a distancing one — André Chemetoff ’s muted cinematography is sporadically effective, as is Daniel Blumberg’s sparse, clarinet-driven score. By the time the second half raises the stakes, even the dwindling of Abigail’s narration doesn’t ensure that the movie can coalesce its strands into something resonant. Though admirably sensitive to the inner lives of opened souls, “The World to Come” is more a journal with faded photographs than a past made vividly present.