Films > Film Reviews

The Florida Project

Cinema City

20/11/17

The Florida Project is a triumphant, heart-wrenching story of innocence and lust for life trampling and doing a rain dance over despair. Sean Baker, acclaimed director of the iPhone-shot film Tangerine, delivers another dazzling piece of film-making to your screens in this tale about a rag-tag group of children passing the summer in an extended-stay motel on the doorstep of Disneyland.

The film continually sets hope against reality, but mercifully refrains from overt symbolism and overstatement. Despite Halley (Bria Vinaite) and her daughter Moonee (Brooklynn Prince) living below the poverty line, they are far from miserable. Why? Because the traumas and difficulties of the world are screened through the eyes of a gaggle of mischievous six-year-olds. There is no lesson to be learnt here, no polarised morality or screaming about social injustice, there is just a cross-section of someone’s world, a world that’s troubled but magical. A world where fart noises and breakfast food are more important to a child’s mind than struggling to pay rent.

Our young protagonists find joy in the bleakest of settings and perhaps that is why this film is so refreshing to watch, despite their parents’ continual struggle for existence, because it trains you to see everything as an adventure. From spitting on cars to begging for ice cream, there is happiness to be wrung out of the most desolate of moments.

The colour-scheme is glorious and the pastel sets and costumes make you imagine that the producers were sat one day eating Party Rings and decided yup, this is it, for the first time ever we will create a film with the visual aesthetic of biscuit icing … And it works - the film is darned delicious to look at! But this is a pick ‘n’ mix sweet selection of a story that throws liquorice Allsorts of melancholy in with the strawberry laces of euphoria. It’s easy to imagine that, in other hands, this could have been a very different type of film - you can’t help thinking that if a gritty British director such as Ken Loach had gotten hold of the project, you would be looking at graffitied concrete, low-saturation filters and serious people muttering profundities in the corners of cold rooms.

To say that Willem Dafoe’s performance as the manager of Magic Castle is understated is an understatement, but he brings such a sheer wealth of feeling through the simplest of lines and movements that his depiction of Bobby, a man who gradually becomes a father figure to an entire community, is unquestionably one of the best performances of his career. Vinaite is sensational as Halley, Moonee’s doting but dysfunctional mother, who for all her ‘don’t fuck with me’ attitude, is just another scared and lost child trapped in the sink hole of the Neverland American Dream.

Whilst it does show that existence is tough, this film is a triumph because its characters are never broken by the weight of the world. It reminds us that, despite everything, children will always dream and explore and seek out the majesty in the day-today that most of us had forgotten was there.

9/10