Review of The Florida Project (2017) by K Nife C — 08 Dec 2017

Finally, a film has come along this year that lives up to and surpasses my personal hype. With Tangerine and Starlet, Sean Baker approached somewhat lurid subject matter with a delicate sensibility, one that neither judges nor endorses, but nonetheless celebrates.

These aren't stories on the fringes of society so much as they are deep cuts in the lives of otherwise forgotten people. One would be hard-pressed to call the characters every day people - or as Barton Fink would have called them "the common man" - but by the end of those films, the lives of these eccentric characters simultaneously become ordinary yet exceptional.

The Florida Project is no divergence from his focus on the poverty-afflicted urban world, but the edges are softened from the over-the-top romp of Tangerine. The film concerns the lives of a young girl, her single mother, their landlord (Willem Dafoe), and the girl's childhood friends.

As typical of Baker's filming style, he mixes amateur with professional actors, and many of the scenes are comprised of improvisational dialogue. We witness this purple and pink world and its events primarily through the eyes of the girl played by Brooklynn Prince.

She's a bright girl who thrives in the squalor of an Orlando welfare hotel, and this setting is an ideal starting place for understanding the socioeconomic disparity that plagues the US. Poverty begets poverty, and there are generations of it wasting away in the shadows of the Disney World theme park.

A beacon of American oligarchy and co-opted imaginations, this vapid tourist pit scraped out of the frontal lobes of America's children stands in stark contrast to the cultural desert and wealth inequality which the girl and her mother find a tentative homeostasis in.

The absent fathers of almost every family in the film are replaced by the weary but protective Willem Dafoe in one of his most refined performances in a very long time. He is, essentially, one of the few left in this place with a conscience, perhaps as penance for something in his past.

A common misquotation (but regardless, very true statement) attributed to Mahatma Ghandi is "the greatness of a nation can be judged by how it treats its weakest member". This rang out loudly by the conclusion of the film, and, sad to say, our nation is clearly not as great as it could be.

When the girl and her mother walk down the street for a free hotel meal given to those who could afford much more, it is an act of defiance against a system that cares for them only in so much as it can control them and that clearly has enough to provide for many more people than it is willing to concede.

There is still hope, though, and the last few minutes of the film sent me into uncontrollable tears from the joy, the sadness, and the maddening euphoria of escape from the prisons we were born into.