Title: The Florida Project
Year: 2017
Genre: Drama
Country: USA
Language: English, Spanish, Portuguese
Director/Editing: Sean Baker
Screenwriters: Sean Baker, Chris Bergoch
Music: Lorne Balfe
Cinematography: Alexis Gabe
Cast:
Brooklynn Prince
Bria Vinaite
Willem Dafoe
Valeria Cotto
Christopher Rivera
Mela Murder
Aiden Malik
Caleb Landry Jones
Josie Olivo
Macon Blair
Rating: 7.7/10
It is a common stratagem for filmmakers to probe into life's hardship through a kid's innocent eyes. In Sean Baker's THE FLORIDA PROJECT, six-year-old Moonie (Prince) lives with her unemployed single mother Halley (Vinaite) in a motel room near Walt Disney World. The film offers a slice-of-life representation of their marginalized existence, mostly seen from Moonie's perspective.
Like his prior works, Baker makes a good fist of eliciting raw performances from his mostly first-time performers, here our heroine is Prince, her Moonie is a precocious hellion, cute as a pie but also quite an insubordinate piece of work. Incredibly, Prince exhibits preternatural spontaneity whenever the camera is on her, which totally masks any trace of self-consciousness (the kryptonite of acting). And when the chips are down, she can be as emotive as any pro, who has the heart to not affected by a child being pushed to a breaking point and then bursting out crying?
Which, actually flags up Yours Truly's pet peeve, the manipulation of a child performer, because if innocence represents a child's innate virtue, any noticeable maneuvering behind the camera critically vitiates that virtue. Thankfully Baker doesn't overstep the mark, most of the time , his low-angle camera follows Moonie and her co. scampering and sauntering in their poor man's Wes Anderson milieu (to some, it is rather shocking to learn the particolored locality is actually factual, which Baker and his team exploits with phenomenal effects, the mauve-tinged afterglow and rainbows are eyefuls).
The escapism - Moonie's horseplay and mischief with her friends - soon cedes to the gritty reality that encircles her and Halley, who is barely a child herself and often they cut up together like two sisters. And in the person of Halley, Baker broaches a controversial question, is Halley an apt mother? Assessed by her with-two-barrels bitchiness, Halley is portrayed as unsympathetic and responsibility-wanting, the typical white trash who has no chance of bettering herself, who is answerable to that? (that should be the lingering question here!). But as a mother, she does her best to look after Moonie, however inadequate, you cannot blame her for that, but it doesn't mean she is beyond reproach. Therefore, THE FLORIDA PROJECT proposes a classic case of “doublethink”, Halley is simultaneously a good mother and a bad mother, her want is oceanic,yet within her own limited means, she is as capable a mother as anyone else. One could only wish Baker could have teased out more nuances from Vinaite's unrefined exertion (a similar problem afflicts his previous feature TANGERINE, 2015).
The sole name actor among the cast, a rugged Dafoe plays Bobby, the diamond-in-the-rough manager of the motel, with heartfelt believability, and earns a well-deserved Oscar nomination. As a custodian of those unattended kids, Bobby can be too easily and banally read as a missing father figure, caring and overly sympathetic, but Dafoe knows exactly where to draw his line in the sand, his Bobby has no illusion to provide those kids more than what he oughts to, and within that parameter , his presence projects a chink of light against all the adversary. He is that kind of ordinary hero whose story isn't sensationally enough to be worthy of a cinematic treatment, so it is to Baker, Dafoe and co-scribe Chris Bergoch's credit that Bobby is here to stay.
The film is stupendously shot on 35mm film until that surreal flourish in the end, where Baker's guerilla-style takes over, as Moonie and her pal Jancey (Cotto) hare into the real Disneyland to escape their pending separation, it is surreptitiously shot with iPhone 6s Plus, but those abrupt shifts in image's quality and stability feel too jarring to call it a success, other than a wish fulfillment Baker doesn't know how to jettison (personally, I prefer Moonie retaining her oblivion of the situation, the sudden innocence lost is too much for her at that stage), one may even suspect it is the raison d'être in Baker and Bergoch's original conception.
referential entries: Baker's TANGERINE (2015, 7.3/10); Andrea Arnold's AMERICAN HONEY (2016, 7.9/10).
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