Widescreen: Remarkable 'Florida Project' depicts a little-known facet of American life
At the end of the month, my family will make its annual pilgrimage to Walt Disney World. For a week, we'll relax in our French Quarter-themed hotel, indulge in Citrus Swirls and Mickey Pretzels, and watch fireworks explode over a fairy-tale castle.
Just a few miles away on Irlo Bronson Memorial Highway in Kissimmee, children who call a purple, three-story, $40-a-night motel their home see the Magic Kingdom as an impossible dream.
Such children are the focus of the remarkable "The Florida Project," director Sean Baker's film that defies conventional description. It's available now for sale and rental on digital platforms, and debuts Tuesday, Feb. 20, on DVD and Blu-ray.
The fictional subjects of Baker's film live in a very real place - you can book a room at the Magic Castle Inn & Suites online - and illustrate a very real problem. These transient residents are the "hidden homeless" of the Orlando area, piling entire family units into a double-bedroom and paying weekly rent to the motel manager.
That manager is Bobby, played by Willem Dafoe. He is one of just three established actors in the film, and earned a supporting-actor Oscar nomination for his sensitive, nuanced performance as a man who has to be tough about the house rules but who also has affection for the people he calls "neighbor" - Bobby's a resident at the Magic Castle, too.
Bobby has to visit the family in 323 a lot. Halley (newcomer Bria Vinaite), a very young mom who swears she isn't smoking blunts in her room, can't always make rent. Her 6-year-old daughter Moonee (Brooklynn Prince) is a troublemaker of the highest order; when we meet her, she and her friends are hocking loogies on a new resident's car at the motel next door. Halley depends on her downstairs neighbor to slide Moonee free food from the diner where she waits tables. When she can't find work, Halley buys junky perfume at a wholesale shop and tries to sell it at a markup to tourists in nicer hotels' parking lots. Late in the film, we realize why she asked Moonee to help her take impromptu "swimsuit selfies" with her smartphone.
I know, this sounds like a depressing movie. But the miracle of "The Florida Project" lies in Baker's tonal balance; Prince proves the adage that kids say the darnedest things and keeps us laughing throughout the film. If her life is supposed to be sad, Moonee apparently never got the memo. Beyond that, the film never asks us for our sympathies or judges its characters. It doesn't demonize Disney, nor does it make excuses for Halley's parenting choices. Baker's film allows us to experience a facet of American life very few of us knew existed, and asks us to take it at face value: Here are people in a less-than-ideal situation, and here is how they cope with it.
That's not to say it isn't sad - the ending packs quite the one-two punch. But "The Florida Project" is a full, rich, real experience, enhanced by the verisimilitude of its cast of nonactors. Not a single moment in it feels false.
• Sean Stangland is a Daily Herald multiplatform editor whose favorite ride at the Magic Kingdom is Big Thunder Mountain Railroad. Follow him on Twitter at @SeanStanglandDH.