Sean Baker (2017)

It’s a good title.  The ‘Florida project’ was the working name for what became the Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando, Florida – aka Disney World.  The setting of Sean Baker’s story is an extended-stay motel in nearby Kissimmee.  Even though this isn’t a publicly-funded development, its badly off residents introduce a hint of ‘housing project’ into the film’s title. The motel’s name – the Magic Castle – has a Disney ring to it.  One of the strongest elements of The Florida Project, which Baker wrote with Chris Bergoch, is the Magic Castle’s proximity to, and distance from, Disney’s Magic Kingdom.  As a birthday treat for the six-year-old heroine Moonee (Brooklynn Prince), she and her friend Jancey (Valeria Cotto) are taken by Moonee’s mother Halley (Bria Vinaite) to watch the Disney World fireworks – from outside the Magic Kingdom.  Its realms are geographically close but financially inaccessible.  The finale of The Florida Project (a two-stage nod to the climax of Les quatre cents coups) makes complete emotional sense.  Halley’s variously erratic behaviour leads the Florida Department of Children and Families (DCF) to separate Moonee from her mother and take the child into care.  At the last minute, Moonee breaks free from a DCF officer and dashes to Futureland, the neighbouring motel where Jancey lives with her family.  Jancey grabs Moonee’s hand and the pair keep running – all the way to, and into, Disney World.

The visuals are also a strength of The Florida Project, as they were of Baker’s previous feature, Tangerine (2015).  He and his DoP Alexis Zabe don’t convey the so-near-and-yet-so-far relationship between Disney World and motel world simply by giving the latter a grim appearance.  Bobby (Willem Dafoe), the motel manager, gets the whole exterior of the place painted mauve – a shade surprisingly easy on the eye (it’s closer to the violet than the reddish-purple end of the mauve spectrum), even though you wouldn’t want to live close to it in reality.  The motel’s name isn’t merely ironic either – Moonee and her friends have plenty of low-budget fun and pleasure around the Magic Castle.  It’s a disenchanted place too, though.  A series of short scenes shows Moonee playing with her toys in the bath, and seemingly in a world of her own.  In the last of these scenes Sean Baker reveals exactly when the child’s bath time takes place.  It’s synchronised with Halley’s use of the adjoining bedroom to receive male visitors who help pay the rent.

As I watched the film, I was struck by Baker’s non-judgmental description of his characters but I struggled to match him.   I was sorry Halley’s lack of funds forced her into desperate measures but two hours in her company is a long time, even from the safety of a cinema seat.  The Florida Project is full of lively incident but a little of kids behaving badly always goes a long way with me (and there’s plenty here).  On reflection, I’m not sure that Baker is as impartial as I first thought.  In presenting Halley as a loving but irresponsible mother, he tends to imply that both qualities are positive:  that Moonee can run wild – be more of a true child, the film seems to say – thanks to Halley’s fecklessness.  Perhaps Baker doesn’t mean to make this connection.  There are other struggling-to-make-ends-meet, caring but less undisciplined mothers in evidence – Ashley (Mela Murder), whom Halley falls out with and physically assaults, Jancey’s mother (Sonya McCarter).  Compared with Halley, however, these two women are at the margins of the story.  It’s striking too that Baker doesn’t follow up the shocking moment when one of Halley’s clients needs to use the bathroom and, on opening its door, is upset to discover Moonee inside.  Elsewhere, Moonee is lively and inquiring but she never asks her mother who the strange man was.

Sean Baker gets remarkable performances from the children in the cast, especially Brooklynn Prince.  Moonee is anything but a crybaby so it’s affecting when she finally bursts into tears, as she makes her desperate escape to Jancey’s motel.  Except for Willem Dafoe, the adult actors with larger roles are virtual unknowns – or were unknown to me, at any rate.  (Caleb Landry Jones makes a very brief appearance as Bobby’s son Jack and Macon Blair has a cameo as a tourist.)   Dafoe’s presence in the cast creates something of an imbalance.  His acting is the opposite of scenery chewing but his familiarity means you’re aware of it as acting even so.  In comparison, the other grown-ups are less like actors than like actual people whose behaviour the camera is recording.  Dafoe interacts well with everyone he shares the screen with, including, in one amusing little scene, three cranes (birds rather than machinery).  There’s a less delightful but nonetheless compelling exchange with a creepy elderly man (Carl Bradfield) hanging round the motel – a paedophile on the prowl, Bobby reckons.  We learn that his marriage to Jack’s mother has broken up but Bobby, in conversation, doesn’t give a lot away.   The regret etched in his face and the doggedness of his bearing, however, say more than is in the script.   Willem Dafoe, in other words, conjures up a sense of Bobby’s past life and makes him magnetic in a way that no one else on screen is.  Thanks to his acting skills, the increasingly exasperated but unfailingly conscientious Bobby becomes the heart of The Florida Project though I’m not sure this is what Sean Baker intended.

10 November 2017