‘Florida’
he’s had little chance to attend to his own.
It’s the tension between hardscrabble realism and buoyant fantasy — and the understanding that they are both, in fact, vital aspects of the same experience — that makes “The Florida Project” so powerfully unresolved. Another filmmaker might have stumbled into the trap of romanticizing his characters’ poverty, but Baker has an unusual ability to keep contradictory moods, ideas and perspectives in balance.
Late in the film, he strikes a note of awe when he follows Moonee and her friends into a nearby field of grazing cattle — an interlude of such lush, dreamlike poetry that you’re almost taken aback when the ruthless, unsentimental logic of the story reasserts itself.
That honesty finds a heartrending echo in Prince’s performance, which goes so far beyond the precocious mugging that often passes for child acting that it all but defies that classification. Beneath Moonee’s beaming innocence we can sense buried layers of suspicion and melancholy, as if she were partly aware of the cruel truths unfolding just beyond her field of vision. In one of the movie’s most resonant, casually revealing moments, Moonee murmurs, “I can always tell when adults are about to cry.”
That might be another way of saying that she can see the ending coming, though I’m not sure how anyone could. In its final moments “The Florida Project” makes an astonishing, lyrical leap, one that confirms my sense that Baker is not just an unusually observant filmmaker but also a fullfledged magician, a practitioner of the sublime. He has ventured into a world that few of us know and emerged with a masterpiece of empathy and imagination.