Life in all its rude, hilarious glory
The Florida Project
15 cert, 115 min
Dir Sean Baker Starring Brooklynn Prince, Bria Vinaite, Willem Dafoe, Valeria Cotto, Christopher Rivera, Mela Murder, Caleb Landry Jones, Sandy Kane
Writer-director Sean Baker proved with Tangerine, his 2015 indie breakout smash about transgender hookers in Hollywood, that he could make a fizzing, incredibly fresh drama of street life with a camera set-up comprising three iphones. It wasn’t a gimmick any old director could have made work.
As if to prove that he’s not beholden to one fixed aesthetic, Baker has cast this off completely for his new film, The Florida Project, switching to 35mm celluloid and the gifted Mexican cinematographer Alexis Zabe, who worked with Carlos Reygadas on the bewitchingly beautiful Silent Light and Post Tenebras Lux.
The Florida Project absolutely sings as a visual achievement, and not only as that. Working again with co-writer Chris Bergoch, Baker has chosen for his setting a roadside strip-motel in Orlando, and turns it into the single most vivid location in recent movies.
The film revolves around a halfdozen characters, all of them living inside it, most of them semipermanently. Three of them are children: six-year-old Moonee (Brooklynn Prince), her buddy Scooty (Christopher Rivera) and a new friend called Jancey (Valeria Cotto), who lives in the “Futureworld” complex behind theirs.
Moonee, one of the sweariest and funniest six-year-old characters you could hope to meet in pictures, is unapologetic, to say the least. Her dialogue is hysterically rude, smart, snappy and get-out-of-town, as if she’d watched Tangerine more than a few times and decided to model her whole outlook on its attitude-filled heroines. (“You’re not welcome!” she screams when thanked for taking her trouble elsewhere.)
She’s a terrible influence on her friends, scamming strangers for ice-cream money and setting fire to entire condo blocks while running around unsupervised. But if you think she’s a handful, wait till you get a load of her mother Halley (Bria Vinaite), an unattached pothead who scrapes together her rent in all the dubious ways you might guess – as well as some you might not – and goes around moaning or laughing her head off at anyone who stands in her way.
Moonee is Moonee because Halley is Halley, and they each form new allegiances, and lose them, on a practically hourly basis. Baker follows a few days in their lives, only the last one of which turns out to be critical, and his confidence with the actors, setting and look is so vital that the film gets by with zero plot for a good hour.
It has life, rather than plot: the kids run wild, Halley slams her door on the blowback, and most of the grief settles on the fatigued shoulders of one man, who has no role in their lives except for managing the building they live in.
Baker’s big name here is Willem Dafoe, and he is the best Willem Dafoe he’s been in goodness knows how long. As long-suffering motel caretaker Bobby, who’s trying his best but understandably has his limits, Dafoe settles into this environment so skilfully you could sometimes swear he was a local, like all the other performers Baker found.
Vinaite, a tattooed hellraiser, can work her charm when she needs to, and switch it off with horrific speed. She wasn’t an actress, just a face from Instagram, whom the director direct-messaged to get involved. It’s quite a debut, up there with the best discoveries of Andrea Arnold, and Brooklynn Prince is similarly impossible to take your eyes off.
The tussles between Bobby and Halley gradually take over from Moonee’s destruction sprees to occupy the film’s core. Every gesture he makes to assist them feels like a prelude to some final straw, and the tension of the movie lies in wondering when his admirable patience and stamina are simply going to run out.
Like Robert Forster in Jackie Brown, he’s a good guy managing to keep a sense of humour in a madly gruelling job. Dafoe has a wonderful scene dissuading some stray herons from blocking his forecourt, and it’s around here that you want to take your hat off to what a warm job of assistance he’s given Baker and the rest of this cast.
The derelict spectre of Recession America is firmly on Baker’s mind in this, and he pushes that theme to the foreground just a tad when the kids start mucking around in the disused condo. But he never strays from an ultra-realistic point of view, and gets so many crazy laughs from their vocabulary you’ll forgive him almost anything.
As a location, their purple-painted multi-storey block is a compositional gift that somehow never gets old: Zabe’s luxurious colour palette, popping with green lawns when we get out and about, would have been the envy of Jonathan Demme, and his night photography is astounding. TR