Review of The Florida Project (2017) by Don F — 26 Nov 2017

Just outside of Walt Disney World sits the town of Kissimmee, Florida. Set along a wide, busy strip near a private airport are a string of cheap, brightly painted motels with names like "The Magic Castle" and "The Futureland Inn" that hope to cash in on unwitting travelers' booking errors. They're also home to a group of down-on-their-luck transients who are barely scraping by.

"The Florida Project" focuses mainly on the children of these transients, who are on summer vacation and having a blast. Their ringleader is a fearless 6-year-old girl named Moonee, whose mother, Halley, looks barely old enough to drink. Halley is a pretty rough character, but has a few redeeming qualities, the main one being that she loves Moonee and tries to make her happy by doing things like sneaking her into all-you-can-eat breakfast buffets at nice hotels.

Moonee runs around with a pack of kids that includes her buddy Scooty who lives downstairs and a new girl named Jancey who lives with her grandmother in the motel down the road. The kids entertain themselves by spitting from the second-floor balcony onto parked cars, scamming free ice cream, and exploring an abandoned housing development that went bust before it was finished. They're constantly shouting over one another, which makes it impossible to catch all of the dialogue, but gives it an air of authenticity.

One of the best characters in the film is Bobby (Willem Dafoe), the motel's paternalistic manager who suffers through the kids' pranks and Halley's foul-mouthed disrespect, but still does his best to protect them whenever the opportunity presents itself.

As enjoyable as it is to watch Moonee and her pals running wild and treating the strip as their own personal playground, the film is infused with a sense of foreboding that becomes stronger the further along it gets. It also has one of those love-it-or-hate-it endings that unfortunately I hated.

Sucky ending aside, the movie is a testament to the joys of summer as a free-range kid (which used to be known simply as a "kid"). It's hard not to wonder if kids like Moonee grow up to be adults like Halley, but I'd really prefer not to.