The Florida Project

Directed By: Sean BakerWritten By: Sean Baker and Chris Bergoch Starring: Brooklynn Prince, Bria Vinaite, Willem Dafoe, Valeria Cotto, Mela Murder 

Verisimilitude has fast become

Sean Baker’s stock-in-trade. A crusader of the socioeconomically marginalised, Baker’s filmmaking has immediacy, realism, and is marked by an eagerness to completely lose itself in whatever portion of the world it’s depicting.

2015’s Tangerine, for example, although teeming with cinematic flair and flamboyance, signals a miraculous deep-dive into one of LA’s sketchiest corners, and a single day in the lives of two transgender prostitutes who work on it. It’s a film Baker famously shot entirely on iPhone 5 cameras, as a means of achieving heightened propinquity.

Take-Out took us inside the world of an illegal Chinese immigrant, who rallies to muster funds for a loan shark by way of tips, similarly, over the course of a single night.

In both those cases, we get the sense these are very real people, living very real lives. They could have been documentaries.

The Florida Project is a little bigger, and a little more “Hollywood”. It’s longer than Baker’s other films, both in runtime and narrative span; its look is slightly more polished; and amongst it’s predominantly unknown cast is big-screen stalwart Willem Dafoe, lending a semblance of commercial clout. But fundamentally Baker sticks to that which he has come to champion in the past: a deeply naturalistic, finely tuned evocation of circumstance and place, a snapshot built upon bruising authenticity, if one that’s not quite as tune with its characters as those previous efforts were.

The circumstance is that of a low, often no income single mother, one who perpetually scraps day-to-day for money to rent a dingy Orlando motel room. It’s a life lived on a financial tightrope with no safety net.

The place is brutal in its irony, the Magic Castle Motel, a glorified dump that rests just a stone’s throw away from the “happiest place on Earth”; Disneyworld cruelly overlooking, as if to mock the motel’s unfortunate tenants who will likely never afford a ticket through those coveted gates.

For a second, the Magic Castle Motel might seem like something conjured by Wes Anderson—it has pink and purple concrete walls which at a distance look like sheets of cake frosting. But don’t be fooled. This is a dirty, gritty site (nothing like the eye-catching wonders Anderson builds) one originally spawned to capitalise on the influx of tourists, but which has since become something of a de facto welfare unit.

That’s not to say the motel lacks vitality. Moonee is our protagonist, a larger-than-life six-year-old girl on school holidays, who busies herself by running amok with her comrades and zipping through the motel and its surrounds like a firecracker tethered to a pinball (Moonee is played, quite perfectly, by Brooklynn Prince, who never for a second appears affected in her performance.)

Mostly, Moonee just does the sort of things kids do when they’re bored and have no supervision. When we first meet her, she’s spitting down from a balcony onto a parked car, flanked by her friends Scooty and Dicky. Later, after Dicky has been grounded, Moonee and Scooty recruit a new partner in crime, a young girl named Jancey (Valeria Cotto), who lives in the adjacent motel with her grandmother. Together these kids will con adults into buying them ice-cream (a single cone which the group will share, licking it once before passing it along in the chain like it were a game of pass the parcel), play hide and seek amongst the Magic Castle’s confines, and run experiments that could only be conceived in the mind of  a child, such as putting a dead fish in the motel swimming pool to see if it will come back to life, or shutting off the power, just because. It’s as though these kids are grafting their very own amusement park, one built upon curiosity and abandon; “find your kingdom” reads the film’s tagline.

When Moonee is with her mother, Halley, she unknowingly helps keep the family’s head above water. She aids her mother in hawking perfume to passers-by, collects stolen food from out the back of a diner, and, perturbingly, takes bikini clad photographs of her mother which will later be used as marketing material for sex work.

Bria Vinaite plays Halley, an untried performer the likes of which Baker has made a habit of using in his career, and offers a performance that, like Prince’s, is startling real. What seeps through in Vinaite is a certain anguished humanity. Halley is fiercely belligerent, vulgar, clearly unfit to look after a child, but she loves her daughter, and wishes she were a better parent.

Overlooking the motel is its manager Bobby (Willem Dafoe). Bobby is something of a question mark. The Magic Castle Motel is apparently his life. He seems lonely and unfulfilled. Dafoe in the role supplies the film’s sole rays of warmth, Bobby reluctantly but compulsively taking on the role of father-figure to both Halley and the motel’s anarchist children, even as he incessantly clashes with them. There’s real tenderness in him.

Sean Baker, totally free of plot, cycles between these people—the misadventures of the youths, the tireless struggle of Halley, the hesitant nurturing from Bobby— homing in, laser like, on the impoverished and their routine battle, homing in on the people who are out of view for so many Americans. It’s the sort of film which, had it been made by the likes of Ken Loach, would have served as a scathing polemic on the chew-‘em-up-and-spit-‘em-out configuring of capitalism. But Sean Baker’s preoccupation is not one of statements, but more of empathy, the director devoting himself generously to bringing this world and its people into the sharpest focus possible, so that we might better understand it for ourselves. Halley, for all of her belligerence, is never judged. Moonee, for all of her recklessness, is never looked down upon. There are no assessments in The Florida Project, only matter-of-fact observations.

It’s an approach which for the longest time works, but it must now be said that The Florida Project isn’t ultimately the masterpiece it might have been. What fails the film is its niggling absence of character depth. For all of its perspective, achieved with eyes both clear and wide, I couldn’t stop myself craving a more tangible story, craving characters with trajectories, as opposed to characters who merely languish in the one state.

We sense there is great loneliness in Bobby, a faint undercurrent of tragedy, but from where and why? We can see that Halley has been led astray at some stage, that she may have been a victim of some horror in her life, but what exactly put her in a schlocky motel alone with a six-year-old girl, and where does she go from here? For a film that devotes itself singularly to taking us inside the lives of its characters, there is a peculiar unwillingness to develop them.

One can’t help but feel there’s another whole movie Baker is withholding from us, one more in touch with the finer grains of its characters, and one perhaps, more involving. There’s nothing more to learn about Moonee, or Halley, or Bobby, that wasn’t already learnt within ten minutes of their company. It’s a shame, a curious shame felt doubly given just how generous and attuned to this world Baker proves to be.

In his review of Midnight Cowboy, Roger Ebert said of John Schlesinger’s Oscar winner that watching it was like looking at a great painting through six inches of Jell-O— its greatness is still there, just veiled. I would say the same of The Florida Project, one of the great American films in terms of transporting its viewers; but that greatness is masked by the absence of more concrete storytelling. Sean Baker has great insights regarding what daily routines such as those stuck at the Magic Castle Motel consist of, but few insights regarding the emotional development of those same people.

Rating:

2.75/4