The Florida Project - Review

The Florida Project

Director Sean Baker, who’s 2016 film “Tangerine” won high appraise at the 2016 Sundance Film festival delves once again into the world of people we subconsciously pass by everyday day in “The Florida Project”. A warm, vivacious, glorious, deeply moving and equally unforgettably look at adolescent childhood.

Taking place mostly at art deco lavender colored hotel called the “The Magic Castle” on a stretch of highway just outside the Disney World, the film largely follows the adventurous of a free spirted vivacious six-year-old little girl named Moonee (Brooklynn Prince)  and her rebellious mother Halley (Bria Vinai) over the course of a single summer. The two live week to week – sometimes day to day at a low budget hotel managed by Bobby (Willem Dafoe.

Despite the sometime harshness of Moonee’s surroundings, the precocious and ebullient Moonee has no trouble making each day a true celebration of life with day after day endless afternoon excursion in and around her hotel complex with her two other playmates named Jancey and Scooty. Together they fearlessly explore the utterly unique world their parents have thrown them in. A sometimes monstrously unfit world in fact where their mothers and fathers who do love them dearly are terribly short on the necessary emotional and maturity skills to raise them properly.

REVIEW: To be honest, I had to take 24 hours to really think about how to describe my thoughts on “The Florida Project”. It’s hard to put into words. Some of you will not like it and others of you will be affected as I was, totally unable to stop thinking about these wonderful  characters. 

I guess I was captivated by them because in some measure they reminded me  of my childhood, relying less on TV and technologies and more on the many inanimate objects around the home and in my community as gateway adventures to my magical fantasies. A dairy farm with cows as a safari. An old abandon home as a castle of kings and queens. Going inside unlocked doors that say “do not enter” just to see what was inside you were not suppose to touch.  Even sitting with a friend high in a tree branch just to be able see farther away. “The Florida Project” captures these experiences and many more as one of the most effective cinematic portrayals of American adolescent childhood you will ever see. An amazingly authentic tale of children living happily with no real stability in their lives while completely immersed in abject poverty. A touching film from beginning to end as a microcosm of the many people in rural America we see each day, especially on those long family trips while passing many old hotels - motels along the way. Minimalist looking buildings filled with essentially good people who are locked into the daily equation of living each waken moment like gypsies perpetually on the run and yet always trying to make do from one minute to minute of turning bad situations into something better.

This film is not some romantic sugarcoated story. It’s a strip down in your face humanist tale of people facing long odds on having any kind of meaningful successful life. And yet in spite of their meager existence they’re happy, always taking the necessary steps forward they hope will offer the promise of a new glimmer of hope for the next day.

As for the casting, I have to start with six year Brooklynn Prince who plays the central character “Moonee” is absolutely brilliant. She doesn’t recite lines, she inhabits them. I could only imagine she’s what British Actress Dame Judy Dench must of been like as child – born talented to be an actress. I really don’t know if the Academy has the courage to nominate a small child of the age of six for the Best Actress category, but she damn sure deserves it. She gives an unflinchingly funny, equally moving and heartfelt performance. Hands down Miss Prince is the acting discovery for 2017.

Willem Dafoe, the only real veteran actor in the film, gives an astonishing performance as the manager Bobby. He gives the film the mature grounded core that is needed of a man whose stern exterior gruffness hides a more deep seeded soul of fatherly kindness and compassion. He’s probably seen more than his share of good people he has to evict from his hotel and probably knows with a wrong turn or two in his life “there but for the grace of God go I". Dafoe is almost a certain lock for a Best Supporting Actor nomination.

Finally, first time actress Bria Vinaite who plays Moonee’s mom Halley is also noteworthy as well. She does a delicate balance of being a loving mom and equally someone you despise. She is lazy, trashy, quick to anger, vulgar and impulsively despicable, so much so that at times you actually wish you could leap out of your theater chair to strangle her on the screen. She tries to give her daughter Moonee a world of endless enchantment and yet exposes her to the harshness of reality by turning tricks with her “Johns” while Moonee is locked in the bathroom. Over time (and In the end) you find yourself judging less Halley’s many bad choices and wondering more just how many Halley’s are there in America resorting to these choices just to survive.

The Florida Project is a totally innovative original piece of work that feel less like a movie and more like documentary. But if you can get past its oddly nuisance dialogue and seemingly oddly disjointed mixture of children acting like the adults and the adults behaving like children, I promise you by the second half of the films’ 1:55 minute running time you will find yourself totally absorbed by these children’s sense of daily discovery, sadness, heartbreak and hopefulness……a sense of childlike hope to be sure of the unbreakable possibility of a better tomorrow.

Sometimes funny. Sometimes hilarious. Sometimes brutal to contemplate. Sometimes heartbreaking. Sometimes poverty. Sometime paradise. Sometimes the truth for millions of Americans we pass by on the highway, The Florida Project tells their real story as one of the Best Films of 2017.

4 Stars