Review: The Florida Project

Image courtesy of A24.

Much like "Boyhood" or "Moonlight," Sean Baker's "The Florida Project" is a movie that doesn't make for the easiest sell when describing it. The film is about a couple of kids and their lower class parents who live in a cheap motel overseen by a stressed out, but good natured manager, a few blocks away from Disney World in Orlando. There's a fair amount of drama in the film, but little in the way of plot. The picture is observational, rather than narrative driven, and its broken up into a series of vignettes that are often hilarious, frightening, heart warming and heartbreaking. And yet, this is an amazing movie - one of the best, if not the best, I've seen so far this year.

In Brooklynn Prince, Baker - whose last film was "Tangerine," a movie about two transgender prostitutes that was shot on an iPhone - has found a pint-sized superstar. Her performance as Moonee - the leader of a group of good-natured but rambunctious children who make the Magic Castle motel their playground - is the best by a child that I can recall since Quvenzhane Wallis in "Beasts of the Southern Wild." Much of the time, it's difficult to discern whether the lines blurted out by her and her friends are scripted or ad libbed, but both Prince and Baker should be commended for the result.

Moonee spends her days causing mischief with Scooty (Christopher Rivera) and shy Jancey (Valeria Cotto), who lives down the street the Futureland Inn. The trio wreak all manor of havoc - spitting on parked cars from a balcony, accidentally starting a fire, shutting off the fuse at their motel, busting up old furniture in an abandoned home - in the way that bored kids tend to do. The film is also on-the-money in the manner in which it depicts how children say the damnedest things - my personal favorite is when Moonee declares that if she had a pet alligator, she'd name it Anne.

But life for Moonee is not all fun and games. Her mother, Halley (Bria Vinaite) has no actual job to speak of - rather, she drags Moonee along to help her sell perfume that she's bought in bulk to rich people outside of Orlando's resorts. Occasionally, Halley does other, illegal things for money with Moonee often sitting in the bathroom of their slightly run-down motel room. Halley's best friend is Scooty's mother, Ashley (Mela Murder) - that is, until the kids cause some trouble that leads to a rift between the two parents.

Willem Dafoe gives one of the best performances of his career as Bobby, the hotel's much beleaguered manager, who also acts the de facto mayor of the motel community, a majority of whom are not guests, but live-in families who are below the poverty line. There is, however, one pretty funny sequence during which a pair of tourists on their honeymoon who accidentally made a mistake in booking their accommodations end up at the Magic Castle. Bobby also acts as a default father for the motel's kids, whose parents are too wrapped up in their own dramas to notice that their children are running wild. There's a particularly powerful scene in which Bobby notices a creepy old man leering at the children on the property and he reacts accordingly.

One of the elements of "The Florida Project" that makes it so special is how it is, on the one hand, often a funny, joyful and wildly exuberant picture but, at the same time, deeply sad and true to life. There may be an element of fantasy - and the picture ends with a beautiful flight of fancy as a temporary respite from a bleak scenario that plays out during the final 20 minutes - but the film is grounded in reality. This is a movie that turns its lens on poverty, but doesn't flinch or turn away to shield viewers from unpleasantness. Nor does it exploit its characters or judge them. And it's no small feat that it manages to depict characters - Halley, for instance - who are deeply flawed, but still manage to elicit our sympathy, regardless of how one might view their choices.

Viewers will have their varying opinions on whether Disney World is a magical kingdom, but the film's choice of location - a ramshackle hotel filled with people barely getting by that is down the street from a multi-billion dollar generating tourist spot - is perfect for this film. This is the type of movie that can change one's perception of how the other half lives. It's also one of the best movies I've seen regarding the day-in, day-out lives of children.

As I'd mentioned before, it's a film that can be placed in a category with films such as "Boyhood" and "Moonlight," in that it is a humanistic and realistic film that draws us into the lives of people whose existences might not on the surface appear extraordinary, but the sum total of their experiences can deeply move us. And it's the type of film that, much like those aforementioned movies, is one that I doubt you'll likely soon forget. This is a great film.