‘The Florida Project’ (2017) ****/*****
Any theater currently playing this indie is the happiest place on Earth
Telling a story about the downtrodden peasants who live just outside of the castle walls, whose perspectives get largely ignored when we go back and catalogue the history of humanity, would be an interesting idea for an indie movie on its own. To tell this story, but to set it in modern times, is a super-great A+ idea. By setting his childhood drama The Florida Project in a pair of fleabag hotels that sit right outside of Disney’s giant theme parks in Florida, and by making his subjects the impoverished lower class people who scrounge together enough weekly scratch to semi-legally maintain permanent residence there, writer/director Sean Baker (Tangerine) has managed to shine a spotlight on a group of people who have been left to rot in our modern economy, all while also telling an emotionally affecting story about trashy though relatable characters who are impossible not to sympathize with.
The story here centers on a mouthy, troublemaking, but often charming six-year-old girl named Moonee (Brooklynn Prince) who lives in a shabby motel room with her part-time stripper, part-time hooker, part-time scam artist, young single mother, Halley (Bria Vinaite), the trouble she gets in scuttling around under adults’ feet like cockroaches with her best friends Scooty (Christopher Rivera) and Jancey (Valeria Cotto), and the real trouble that suddenly appears in her world once her struggling, immature mother’s desperate decisions begin to catch up with her. That’s about it as far as plot goes. This is less a story and more a character piece and a mood piece that anchors you in a setting, let’s you explore, and let’s you get to know the people who live there. Also there’s the B-plot of the hotel manager, Bobby (Willem Dafoe), who works in the background trying to control the chaos and keep his erratic tenants’ lives together as much as he can, all while getting no appreciation or recognition from anyone. But we’ll get more into that later.
Baker has shot a beautiful movie here. His debut feature, Tangerine, was famously shot on iPhones using a down and dirty documentary style, and that movie ended up being very enjoyable to look at, despite or maybe because of the self-imposed limits — but none of that is going on here. The Florida Project is shot on 35mm film, it’s way more ambitious in the way that it steps back from its surroundings in order to create almost mock-heroically epic visual imagery, and it’s so saturated with light and color that it would be almost impossible to not enjoy it on an aesthetic level — especially because this new approach hasn’t led to Baker compromising his ability to get on the ground and insert his camera into the lives of authentic-feeling street hustlers whatsoever. The Florida Project represents the best of both worlds when it comes to sweeping cinematic visuals and pseudo-documentary grittiness.
The acting, across the board, is very strong. It’s all quite naturalist, and it comes as no surprise that many of the performers that Baker is working with were amateurs who were doing their first work. The kids aren’t the normal sort of awkward, showy kid performers who are in most movies. They’re real kids just being kids on camera, free to spaz out and run around seemingly at will with Baker’s camera always trailing behind them. You get the sense that they weren’t too strictly scripted, which does a great job of conveying how weird little kids are and how their developing brains are just constantly misfiring random nonsense right and left. Vinaite has the roughest job here, as she’s playing the most complex character, who despite occasional good intentions does some pretty despicable things, but throughout the whole film she’s able to remain so human and vulnerable that you never give up on her or stop relating to her character. Plus, she’s just so unique looking that you can’t imagine another performer who could step into her role and do what she does. She’ll definitely be getting a lot more work coming out of this performance. Heck, even a bit part actress who says, “This is wholesale,” is great. It’s her only line in the movie, but she delivers it so perfectly that I came away from it wondering who she is.
The story of The Florida Project is Dafoe’s performance though. He completely inhabits this sun-leathered Florida stoic, to the point where even though he’s the most polished performer in the cast, he also comes off as being the most authentic. We only get small glimpses of this guy’s struggle, an idea of what he’s dealing with on a daily basis and in a very private way. He’s rarely the focus of the film, and yet his private pain still manages to steal the whole production out from under the big, showy drama of the A-story. Bobby the motel manager is a tragic cinema hero on par with Humphrey Bogart’s Rick in Casablanca.
The story here is a real simple one, but Baker layers these people’s lives with so many themes and ideas that it’s never anything less than completely engaging. This movie really explores the entitlement of the poor, and how they can often look around, see that they have nothing, and angrily lash out because they’re not just handed the essentials by people who they perceive as having so much more than them. How Baker makes us understand the place their juvenile acting out comes from is by painting a picture of past abuses and neglect, which leads to them starting life steps behind the average person all while trying to navigate the world without the skills that are instilled in those Basic bitches during childhood. They’re blind and mad and stumbling through a hostile society and they don’t know how to deal with that. Setting everything right outside Disney World also adds quite a bit of depth to the film. It’s a destination that middle and upper class kids all over the world dream of going to almost daily, but these lower class kids who live just outside of its gate, in the leftover runoff of its tourist economy, mostly seem oblivious to the fact that it even exists. To them, escapism is stealing away a couple moments to run around in a field, climb a tree, or even rummage around in abandoned condos or spit on cars parked in the vast parking lots that make up most of their environment. There’s a certain kind of beauty in the simplicity of that.
If Tangerine was a bit gimmicky, but overall a good movie that eventually found its heart by the end credits, then The Florida Project is the proof that Baker is a no gimmicks needed filmmaker. This is all heart, all craft, and it’s hopefully the promise of a long career that’s going to bring us all sorts of important work in the future.
