☆☆☆☆
After the success of Disneyland in 1955, Walt Disney was discouraged; his company hadn't been able to secure enough financing to buy up as much land in Anaheim as he wanted, and seemingly overnight tacky tourist motels cropped up to cater to eager park visitors.
Ten years later, he swore he wouldn't make the same mistake, and when he announced "The Florida Project," it was massive in scope, swallowing up 43 square miles of Florida swampland. Life there is perfect. It's better than perfect. Tens of millions of people visit to experience the squeaky clean, highly polished world of Disney.
But you can't erase the real world. Disney's Florida Project tried to shut out problems like slums, squalor, poverty and homelessness. The Florida Project, Sean Baker's languid, meandering but affecting and sometimes beautiful movie, is a powerful reminder that no matter how far Disney pushes the problem out of sight to create a world of make believe, reality has sharp edges that can hurt and cut anyone, especially a child.
The word "Disney" is never spoken in The Florida Project, but from its first moment the forced happiness of the Disney ethic pervades the movie, which mostly takes place in a couple of tacky motels somewhere near the border of Disney's vast Floridian property, primarily the Pepto-Bismol-colored Magic Castle. From the outside, the Castle and its neighbor Future Land ("Stay in the Future!" its rundown marquee beckons) look like places made for really unlucky tourists or really cheap prostitutes, and both are indeed occasional visitors.
Its tenants, though, are sad, desperate people a quarter-step ahead of homelessness. They include a far too young mother, Halley (Bria Vinaite) and her 6-year-old daughter Moonee, who is less "played" by than inhabited by an extraordinary, precocious, entirely natural and wonderfully winning actress named Brooklynn Prince, who in some ways is reminiscent of Beasts of the Southern Wild darling Quvenzhané Wallis. Everything about Moonee is charming, fiercely intelligent and ultimately heartbreaking.
As The Florida Project begins, Moonee is goofing around with some of the other kids from The Magic Castle, getting into the kind of minor trouble that kids have been in since the beginning of the movies, and for a while as the screenplay by Baker and Chris Bergoch, who together also created the shot-on-an-iPhone awards-circuit favorite Tangerine, seems content to just ramble along. Mooney is the leader of her little group, which sometimes resembles a raunchier Little Rascals. They vaguely terrorize the manager of the hotel, Bobby, who is played by Willem Dafoe, whose star status never overwhelms the movie; Bobby seems more like a guy who everyone says, "Anyone ever tell you you look like that Willem Dafoe actor?" And as the film slowly gets going, it is clear that neither Bobby nor Moonee nor Halley nor any of the other characters (except maybe Gloria, the drunk old lady who likes to sunbathe in the nude) is going to be a stereotype.
Bobby loves his strange little motel, and with just a nudge, The Florida Project could be a CBS sitcom from the mid-70s, one of those with a little grunge around the edges. Except The Florida Project avoids that kind of cliché, even when it presents the shows us just how far foul-mouthed, crude but heartfelt Hallee will go to keep a roof over their heads, even if it's a sad and pointless roof.
The Florida Project makes no judgments about its characters, except some surprisingly uplifting ones. Bobby loves his hotel and the people who live there, and they create a family unit because, in the end, everyone needs a family.
Above all, though, The Florida Project pays tribute to the awesome, overwhelming, sometimes head-scratching resilience of childhood. Moonee doesn't know what she's missing, even as she dresses in thrift-shop shirts with castles on them and plays with cheap dolls of obscure Disney characters. It has never crossed her mind that life could be better than it is in The Magic Castle, that everyone doesn't live in a single room with a queen-sized bed co-occupied by a chain-smoking mother.
At one point, Moonee and her best friend Jancey (Valeria Cotto) take a walk out to a breathtakingly beautiful break in the forest, just off the main highway, and sit on the branch of a giant tree. "You know why this is my favorite tree?" Moonee asks. "Because it got knocked down and it's still growing." Baker pulls his camera back to show the sideways, still-growing behemoth, and the moment is as stunning as anything you'll see in a big-budget blockbuster -- and more affecting.
The Florida Project takes a lot of patience for audiences more used to linear storytelling. Its last few moments, though, elicit an equal mix of smiles and tears and reveal the brilliance of its leisurely ways: We've seen these people through something real, something life-changing, something that is disturbing and painful to watch but that views the uncomfortable reality of life through the lens of something that Walt Disney understood, then packaged and resold: the innocence of childhood.
In a moment of exquisite beauty, Moonee promises to show Jancey something wonderful -- and she does indeed, a rainbow that appears after a Florida thunderstorm. The little girls see the wonder, and even as we smile at their joy, The Florida Project dares us to look at the scene and not mourn a little for the pain and the suffering of the future world that awaits the children living on the edges of a dream.
Viewed October 7, 2017 -- ArcLight Hollywood
1930
Ten years later, he swore he wouldn't make the same mistake, and when he announced "The Florida Project," it was massive in scope, swallowing up 43 square miles of Florida swampland. Life there is perfect. It's better than perfect. Tens of millions of people visit to experience the squeaky clean, highly polished world of Disney.
But you can't erase the real world. Disney's Florida Project tried to shut out problems like slums, squalor, poverty and homelessness. The Florida Project, Sean Baker's languid, meandering but affecting and sometimes beautiful movie, is a powerful reminder that no matter how far Disney pushes the problem out of sight to create a world of make believe, reality has sharp edges that can hurt and cut anyone, especially a child.
The word "Disney" is never spoken in The Florida Project, but from its first moment the forced happiness of the Disney ethic pervades the movie, which mostly takes place in a couple of tacky motels somewhere near the border of Disney's vast Floridian property, primarily the Pepto-Bismol-colored Magic Castle. From the outside, the Castle and its neighbor Future Land ("Stay in the Future!" its rundown marquee beckons) look like places made for really unlucky tourists or really cheap prostitutes, and both are indeed occasional visitors.
Its tenants, though, are sad, desperate people a quarter-step ahead of homelessness. They include a far too young mother, Halley (Bria Vinaite) and her 6-year-old daughter Moonee, who is less "played" by than inhabited by an extraordinary, precocious, entirely natural and wonderfully winning actress named Brooklynn Prince, who in some ways is reminiscent of Beasts of the Southern Wild darling Quvenzhané Wallis. Everything about Moonee is charming, fiercely intelligent and ultimately heartbreaking.
As The Florida Project begins, Moonee is goofing around with some of the other kids from The Magic Castle, getting into the kind of minor trouble that kids have been in since the beginning of the movies, and for a while as the screenplay by Baker and Chris Bergoch, who together also created the shot-on-an-iPhone awards-circuit favorite Tangerine, seems content to just ramble along. Mooney is the leader of her little group, which sometimes resembles a raunchier Little Rascals. They vaguely terrorize the manager of the hotel, Bobby, who is played by Willem Dafoe, whose star status never overwhelms the movie; Bobby seems more like a guy who everyone says, "Anyone ever tell you you look like that Willem Dafoe actor?" And as the film slowly gets going, it is clear that neither Bobby nor Moonee nor Halley nor any of the other characters (except maybe Gloria, the drunk old lady who likes to sunbathe in the nude) is going to be a stereotype.
Bobby loves his strange little motel, and with just a nudge, The Florida Project could be a CBS sitcom from the mid-70s, one of those with a little grunge around the edges. Except The Florida Project avoids that kind of cliché, even when it presents the shows us just how far foul-mouthed, crude but heartfelt Hallee will go to keep a roof over their heads, even if it's a sad and pointless roof.
The Florida Project makes no judgments about its characters, except some surprisingly uplifting ones. Bobby loves his hotel and the people who live there, and they create a family unit because, in the end, everyone needs a family.
Above all, though, The Florida Project pays tribute to the awesome, overwhelming, sometimes head-scratching resilience of childhood. Moonee doesn't know what she's missing, even as she dresses in thrift-shop shirts with castles on them and plays with cheap dolls of obscure Disney characters. It has never crossed her mind that life could be better than it is in The Magic Castle, that everyone doesn't live in a single room with a queen-sized bed co-occupied by a chain-smoking mother.
At one point, Moonee and her best friend Jancey (Valeria Cotto) take a walk out to a breathtakingly beautiful break in the forest, just off the main highway, and sit on the branch of a giant tree. "You know why this is my favorite tree?" Moonee asks. "Because it got knocked down and it's still growing." Baker pulls his camera back to show the sideways, still-growing behemoth, and the moment is as stunning as anything you'll see in a big-budget blockbuster -- and more affecting.
The Florida Project takes a lot of patience for audiences more used to linear storytelling. Its last few moments, though, elicit an equal mix of smiles and tears and reveal the brilliance of its leisurely ways: We've seen these people through something real, something life-changing, something that is disturbing and painful to watch but that views the uncomfortable reality of life through the lens of something that Walt Disney understood, then packaged and resold: the innocence of childhood.
In a moment of exquisite beauty, Moonee promises to show Jancey something wonderful -- and she does indeed, a rainbow that appears after a Florida thunderstorm. The little girls see the wonder, and even as we smile at their joy, The Florida Project dares us to look at the scene and not mourn a little for the pain and the suffering of the future world that awaits the children living on the edges of a dream.
Viewed October 7, 2017 -- ArcLight Hollywood
1930
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