On Sunday, my stepdaughter and I saw a wonderful movie: The Florida Project. I had noticed an advertising blurb to the effect that it's a shimmering exploration of childhood, something like that, and thought it might appeal, despite the R rating, to a mature 14-year-old. Perhaps a bit more research would have been in order. The director is Sean Baker, whose previous movie, Tangerine (2015), is known for having been made for a song (it was shot with an iPhone) and for its subject matter (a day in the life of some trans hookers in West Hollywood).
I think "the Florida project" is what Disneyland was called in business memos when it was being planned and then constructed. My guess would be that something about the contrast between that colorless phrase and the goal of creating a childhood dreamscape is what attracted Baker and his colleagues. But Disneyland is until the last scene an off screen presence in The Florida Project, which is set a couple miles away, on the outskirts of Orlando, along a string of gaudily painted crap businesses, including soft-serve ice cream shacks and flophouses, one in particular called The Magic Castle, bright purple, or maybe mauve is the right word, three-leveled, with those concrete walkways and iron railings running outside the doors of floors two and three. Two of the main characters, a 6-year-old girl, Mooney, and her single mother, Halley, an elaborately tattooed and studded former exotic dancer (I think), live in room 323. The third leading character is the motel's manager, played by Willem Dafoe, who, though great in this role, is arguably outdone by the child actress (Brooklynn Prince) who plays Mooney and by Bria Vinaite's Halley. Baker recruited Vinaite after seeing her Instagram account. It's her first role.
That The Magic Castle was originally meant to house Magic Kingdom visitors seems a reasonable surmise, but if so that didn't work out, and the current business plan is to rent to central Florida's poor. Halley pays $38 a day for room 323, which, doing the math, is not super cheap housing, especially considering that it's a damn motel room, no kitchen, no appliances. It's not Exhibit A of the movie, but The Florida Project is good, in an understated way, on some social science relating to poverty. You have to have money to trim costs. Halley has nothing. Reminds me of the way, before moving to my current neighborhood and changing where I shop, I'd always see people getting into taxi cabs with their groceries.
If not for the presence of Dafoe, a recognizable movie star, you might form the impression that The Florida Project is a documentary. The camera follows the characters around and the movie is made of episodes that do not advance a plot. In some, Mooney and her young friends have adventures; in others, Halley and Mooney cavort happily, sometimes working together to rip off tourists when the rent period is approaching its end; and in yet others the Dafoe character does what needs to be done to entertain and protect the at-risk children who reside in the motel he manages. Slowly the details of a world set off from Disneyland by wide avenues of multilane traffic fill in, and it can seem almost bucolic. The movie causes you to realize something that's obviously true but which you may never have thought of: "at-risk children" do not think of themselves as being at-risk. It's summer vacation, school's out, and Mooney and her friends are having fun in the only neighborhood they know.
But Mooney is an at-risk child and the movie doesn't ignore that aspect of her life. I said that the episodes do not advance a plot but the accumulating details do impress upon the audience how precarious these lives are. The money problems persist, the manager's gruff efforts to assist are insufficient, and Halley eventually turns to sex work, sometimes turning tricks in the motel while Mooney sits in the tub behind a closed door bathing the manes of her toy horses. The illegal activity gets reported and representatives from the Department of Children Services are alerted of a case of child endangerment. In the climactic scene (spoiler alert), they come to The Magic Castle to remove Mooney from her home. To this point, the camera has been coolly observing, documentary-style, everything that happens, but now it appears to be ditched in favor of another iPhone as Mooney escapes from the social workers and, with a little friend from the adjoining flophouse, sets out on a grainy jerky phantasmagoric sprint through her seedy neighborhood, across the busy avenues, and through the gates into the Magic Kingdom. I read another review in which this ending was described as a "punt," which it may be in a certain sense, but it is also exhilarating and, anyway, it would be too painful to have to watch what "really" happened.
CORRECTION: Every place I say "Disneyland" I mean "Disney World." It's not a mistake my 7-year-old would make. H/t Bob Edholm.
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