Related to Moxie – Angry Indian Goddesses : A Flawed yet Brave Attempt! She doesn’t just lash out at her boyfriend but is fed up with male-dominated institutions which always give out the biggest opportunities to them, instead of women who equally deserve the same opportunities. One sequence in particular, where she confronts her mother (Amy Poehler)’s boyfriend (Clark Gregg), who talks about male subjects at dinner, is an extraordinarily powerful one, elevated by Robinson’s incredible acting range. There is no dull moment with Vivian she fuels her anger against patriarchy to creating lasting change through her zine and is unafraid to denounce how academic institutions oppress and marginalize women. Hadley Robinson gives a star-making performance as Vivian, who steals every single scene she is in. Moxie works so well due to its seamless direction from Amy Poehler, who fills every ounce of the frame with so much dynamism and electric energy through its dazzling cinematography and powerful acting. What follows is a satisfyingly entertaining film that doesn’t bring anything new to the table with its themes but is still an essential film to watch.
At the same time, she continues to celebrate the school’s football captain (Patrick Schwarzenegger), who likes to harass the school’s women for his own pleasures.
She anonymously publishes a zine named MOXIE that denounces how women are treated at her school while pointing fingers at Principal Shelly (Marcia Gay Harden)’s inaction. The film’s protagonist, Vivian (Hadley Robinson), has had enough of her school’s treatment of women, continuously objectifying them through lists and harassment. There are a few good supporting roles, including Poehler herself, as Vivan’s mother, and an underused Ike Barinholtz as an amusingly flustered but well-meaning English teacher.Amy Poehler’s second directorial feature, Moxie, is a politically-charged film destined to denounce the patriarchal systems that have oppressed women for centuries through a reinterpretation of the Riot Grrl, an underground punk feminist movement that denounced patriarchy and celebrated female empowerment. Alycia Pascual-Pena is particularly good, and part of me wishes the film had centred on her. Working from a screenplay by Tamara Chestna and Dylan Meyer (adapting Jennifer Mathieu’s source novel), Poehler’s direction is unshowy, allowing the strong performances of the leads to dominate.
But the film also finds time for the usual romantic subplots, house parties, best-friend fallouts, parental rows, and so forth that tick the genre boxes.Īlycia Pascual-Pena is particularly good, and part of me wishes the film had centred on her. Waves of controversy ensue, as the girls (and some of the boys) begin to take a stand. Seeing this, and inspired by her mother’s feminist protest past, Vivian devises a mad-as-hell-and-not-going-to-take-it-anymore protest newsletter entitled Moxie, which she anonymously distributes among the school. She complains to the apathetic school principal (Marcia Gay Harden), who essentially tells her to suck it up and kowtow to the internalised misogyny inherent within the school.