Review of The Florida Project (2017) by Damian S — 18 Apr 2018

*SPOILERS*.

A slice of life movie that will stick in your gut. As a one time resident of Florida - I felt I'd seen these people before - walking along busy roads as cars sped by, occupying the hotels, eating in the restaurants, and shopping in the stores - that are on the verge of sinking back into the swamps they were built upon. Florida is in the bottom 15 for median income but top 10 for average home price listing - which is to say there are a lot of poor and working poor in the state who end up in places like the Magic Castle. The circumstances of the cast of characters in the Florida Project certainly aren't unique to Florida though. You'll see similar people in almost every community in America.

There aren't really any heroes in this story - though Defoes hotel manager certainly has admirable qualities that ground the picture and help us empathize with those under his care - even when their eccentric behavior can make that hard. At the end of the picture there also aren't really any easy answers. How as a society should we handle the Moonee's and the Halley's all around us? This strength of this movie is in not answering the hard questions it leaves us with - but instead simply being honest to its characters and their lives.

The ending is jarring - not just because it switches camera styles and abandons a steady-cam - and I immediately disliked it upon first viewing, but it succeeded in metastasizing everything I had been thinking about in it's two hour running time in such a way that I'm still thinking about it two days later - so it may have been more genius than I initially credited with. The people living on the fringes seems to be growing - this film is worth a view to pull back the curtain and see what's too easy to speed by.