Review of The Florida Project (2017) by Ram U — 24 Oct 2017
The Florida Project is a deceptively powerful movie about people living on the margins of society and barely hanging on. Their stories come together in little scraps, you never really know how they got there, or what their back stories are.
But you don't really need to know. Whatever happened to them, they ended up here, in a three-story motel on the outskirts of Disney World in sun-baked Orlando. What holds the movie together, as they do the community of characters in the film, are the children, especially the precocious and happy and carefree little girl, Mooney.
You follow the children through the movie with a sense of dread - they're so small, so innocent, in such a big, indifferent world, you fear that anything could happen to them. So does the hotel manager, played by Willem Dafoe, who is watching the children out of the corner of his eye.
He's keeping an eye out for them, even as he goes about his chores, managing the motel and its residents, out of heavy sense of duty, of loss, of guilt, over something. We never find out what. The center of the movie is Mooney's young mother, Hally, only a girl herself, with not even the slightest sense of what it takes to be a mom.
She makes a little bit of money on the side, working in a strip club, which we never see, selling bottles of perfume that she buys wholesale, and eventually, turning tricks in her hotel room, while Mooney, oblivious, plays innocently in the bathtub with the door closed.
The end of the movie is one of the most amazing, heart-breaking scenes I have ever beheld.
This review of The Florida Project (2017) was written by Ram U on 24 Oct 2017.
The Florida Project has generally received very positive reviews.
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