The Florida Project review

Sean Baker’s “The Florida Project” is a near-perfect snapshot of real-world Americana. Unlike the usual glut of LA/NY films about the lives of ad executives and graphic designers, Baker gives us the fly on the wall point of view of a lively Orlando motel filled with immigrants, tourists and vagrants who are all doing what they can to make it through day to day.  Hollywood routinely ignores the poor unless they wish to exploit them or turn them into cartoonish stereotypes, and while Baker doesn’t shy away from the grimmer realities of those who have slipped beneath America’s social cracks, he never judges them and gracefully creates a deep sense of untraditional family with his cast of mostly unknowns.

Newcomer Brooklyn Prince plays the film’s unofficial lead Mooney, a spunky six year old with a potty mouth and an adventurous spirit that gets her and her friends into trouble. Scooty (Christopher Rivera) and Jancey (Valeria Cotto) follow their instigator as they panhandle for ice-cream money, break into the hotel’s breaker room, and vandalize near-by abandoned homes. Mooney lives with her notably young mother Halley (Bria Valley), who sells hot merchandise and prostitutes herself to pay a weekly rent for their room at a Disneyworld-adjacent hotel, which is managed by the bighearted but overstretched Bobby, played by Willem Dafoe.

While there is clear character arcs the narrative there isn’t a clear three act structure with an inciting incident or second act moment of conflict to be resolved. Because of the movie’s impressionistic, montage approach to storytelling, some might find the lack of a “plot” frustrating. Baker doesn’t want to bog these characters down with a plot contrivance like a personal mission to achieve or a big problem to overcome. Instead this focuses more on the moments between the plot-points in our lives, and since most of this is being experienced through the perspective of a child, we are sometimes shielded from the harder aspects of Mooney’s daily experiences. What Baker creates is a painterly collage of brief moments of recognizable American childhood, where harder adult truths like making rent, finding free food and avoiding the police is treated like a fun game or a way of keeping yourself occupied during summer vacation.

With the exception of Dafoe as Bobby, who turns in a wonderful un-Dafoe performance as the hotel’s surrogate father, the rest of the cast blends into Baker’s attempt at documentary-style verisimilitude.  This means that the acting, like in Baker’s last picture—the iPhone filmed dark comedy “Tangerine”—is too real to focus on performance as an individual element. Much of the dialogue feels improvised and the children often scream and squeak their lines over each other, giving the audience the impression that they aren’t watching a movie, so much as peering through their window, wondering like a nosy neighbor just what the hell these kids are up to.  This, along with the non-traditional narrative structure, is likely to weed out viewers who are more accustomed to Wheaties- commercial style annunciation from their child actors.

The accumulative effect of “The Florida Project” is devastating if you’re willing to open your mind to its unique rhythm. The cinematography by Alexis Zabe combines the handheld immediacy of “Tangerine” with warmly lit, deliberate camera placement that recalls the moodier moments of last year’s Florida-based indie drama, “Moonlight.” Though all the individual components of the film work in harmony, with the exception of some random bathtub shots that are seemingly shuffled in to break up later scenes, the movie’s big takeaway is the compassion it displays for its characters and the tangible, relatable world they inhabit.    

Grade: A-

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Nov-2017