Sean Baker’s new film, “The Florida Project,” which opens today, is thecinematic antidote to helicopter parenting—and it’s artificiallysympathetic to the point of obliviousness. Halley (pronounced like thecomet, played by Bria Vinaite) is a young mother living in themauve-bathed Magic Castle motel, not far from the high-toll gates ofDisney’s Magic Kingdom. She lets her preschool-age daughter, Moonee(Brooklynn Prince), run free all day, while she herself sprawls on herbed slurping sodas and watching daytime TV, and it seems to be working:Moonee is a bright, quick-witted kid with a sense of fun and of humor.As seen in her extended romps with other kids—notably Scooty(Christopher Rivera), who lives downstairs with his mother, and Jancey(Valeria Cotto), who lives in the Futureland Inn motel, next door—Mooneeis a natural leader, the one with the ideas, the persuasive power, thevocabulary, the imagination, the charisma. If you were looking to cast achild actor from among the kids living in the area’s motels, Moonee,quotably precocious and perceptive beyond her years, is the one you’d pick. When a pair ofBrazilian tourists find themselves stuck by accident in the downmarketmotel, Moonee, watching them argue in the lobby, says, “I can alwaystell when adults are about to cry.”
Yet the hard poverty in which Moonee is being raised and the casual,albeit fiercely devoted, parenting that she endures are depicted as alltoo perfect, and all too easy for her. She and her friends romp throughthe area largely unsupervised, exploring and—under Moonee’sleadership—cadging, begging, playing cute for their small pleasures.There’s no scraped knee or cut finger that might get infected, notoothache or cavity, no asthma, no diarrhea, no childhood problem at allthat might put Halley and her parental attention or neglect to thetest—and no sense that the smart, perceptive Moonee is aware at all ofwhat’s missing. She’s intensely conscious of the gap in comforts andpleasures that distinguishes her from more prosperous children, but notof any gap in care or health.
In Baker’s view, motel society comes off as borderline idyllic. There’s nothing to fear from the adults near at hand; everyone isbasically good and nice. There are no drugs, except for grass; no dealersor pimps hanging around; no tough, big kids to scare or bully theyounger ones (never mind that such big kids can be found in the poshestsuburbs). There’s an abandoned complex down the road, which—in a scenereminiscent of one early in Barry Jenkins’s “Moonlight”—shows Moonee, Jancey, and Scooty exploring a dilapidated and abandoned house. (Mooneecalls the tufts of insulation scattered on the floor “ghost poop.”)They’re not scared, and there’s nobody scary at the complex, or, forthat matter, anywhere. Instead of facing trouble or meeting scarystrangers, the three kids make gleeful trouble, smashing a mirror,throwing a toilet out the window, and starting a fire that becomes alocal spectacle. There is, it’s true, a creepy old child molester whocomes by the motel when the kids are playing outside, and he might aswell be wearing a neon label announcing his bad intentions. Fortunately,the motel’s gruff but decent manager, Bobby (Willem Dafoe), sees what’sgoing on and deals with him firmly.
Baker’s film is at its most insightful in its well-conceived scenes ofHalley and Moonee confronting indignities of class. For instance, Bobbyis required by the motel owners to prevent the residents from remainingthere for more than a month at a time (the period required to establishlegal residency); therefore, Halley and Moonee are forced, before the endof the month, to spend twenty-four hours away from the Magic Castle.Bobby moves their belongings from their room into storage, and theyspend the night in a neighboring motel—and, when that second motel getsnew management, another round of annoyances results. (The movie’s ironiccontrast between motel life and nearby Disney World bursts forth in asingle, magnificently bitter sequence that seems to dramatize the veryprice of dreams.) Yet Baker’s approach to his protagonists is blinkered by his manifestsympathy. He sees Halley’s self-delusions and outbursts of anger not asdestructive, or even self-destructive, but as natural responses to theworld of advertised pleasures and comforts from which she’s shut out.Baker never seems to see the poor people in the film—the poor women inthe film—face to face, yet he also doesn’t assume a position as anoutsider, a position that the drama itself, and Baker’s approach to it,builds into the movie.
The one character whom Baker sees eye to eye, without veneration orcondescension, is the long-suffering, bluff-humored Bobby, who’s caughtbetween his duties and his sympathies, and whose tough warmth and fiercesense of protectiveness is balanced by both an awareness of what he’sobserving and a willful overlooking of it. Yet Baker’s identificationwith Bobby seems accidental, even unconscious; it doesn’t structure thedrama or refine the movie’s point of view. Instead, it merely makes thedirector’s presumed but unrealized intimacy with Halley and Moonee allthe less persuasive.
There’s one scene, especially, that is downplayed in the extreme. Halleyhas a little business going, buying perfume wholesale and selling it toDisney World-bound tourists, and when she’s caught by a security guardand threatened with arrest she loses her bag of wares and turns toprostitution. Moonee is taking a bath one day (and told by Halley tostay there until she’s called) when a john, needing to use the toilet,opens the door and, to his distress, finds her there. Yet Moonee neverasks Halley about the man who comes to visit, and Halley neverexplains—any more than she explains why Moonee has to stay in thebathroom for the duration of his visit. What’s more, it’s eventuallyrevealed that Halley has had not one but nine johns. It’s inconceivablethat Moonee doesn’t know that something is up; imagine what she hearsthrough the bathroom door. Instead, Baker sentimentalizes, with awell-meaning but condescending benignity that reminds me of a satiricalscene—of high-school students putting on a skit about prostitution—inthe recent New York Film Festival movie “Mrs. Hyde.”
For all the variety of incident in “The Florida Project,” for all itscareful observation of characters, it’s as emotionally inauthentic andfantastic, under the guise of its hard-edged and warmhearted realism,as the Disneyfied realm with which Baker contrasts it. The movie’shalcyon dramatic narrowness is all the more unfortunate in the light ofwhat Baker can do when he’s looking at his characters—at his actors—withunvarnished simplicity. At the start of the movie, Moonee is introducedwith an exquisite glimpse; she and a friend are sitting side by side,leaning against a wall. When Moonee tilts her head back and bumps itagainst the wall, she reacts with as much surprise as pain, both rubbingher head and frowning as if in anger at the nerve of the wall to get inher way. In an instant, Baker captures the mysterious complexities of achild’s inner life. That’s why it’s all the odder that this nuanced,intensely aware little person at the center of his film, whose love forher mother is obvious, should nonetheless seem so obliviously unaffectedby her mother’s distraction, bitterness, rage, passivity, impotence, andsubjection.
