The Florida Project is as close to just walking around a place as a movie―as distinguished from a VR program―can get. Is it someplace you'd want to go? Complex question. Florida is a place of natural beauty, awesome skies, verdant trees. There is also, to put it mildly, a lot of poverty and dysfunction in this film. I had to step back a few times, but ultimately the characters are as vivid as the land. Director Sean Baker has said that the ending (the only part with non-diegetic music) is an admission that you can only find a happy ending through the eyes of a child.
It's also the only movie I've seen with Willem Dafoe clearing egrets off of a lot and telling them dad jokes.
It's also the only movie I've seen with Willem Dafoe clearing egrets off of a lot and telling them dad jokes.
2 comments:
I loved the kids in the movie, Moonee especially. She was so alive in the world and very realistically precoscious when (among other exploits) she went with her friends to the local ice-cream shack and mooched money from tourists by claiming, with a perfectly straight face, that they need the cones for medicinal purposes. It wasn't until after we'd watched the movie we learned that Willem Dafoe was the only professional actor to play a role.
He was masterful too, grumpy on the surface but with a deep sympathy for the plight of Moonee and her mother. He's often been cast as a somewhat demonic character, but here, he is as humanly approachable as he’s ever been. That scene at the end when the child protective people have come for the girl he is visibly torn and the look of confusion and fear that crosses the child's face is truly heartrending.
I can well understand your reaction of needing to pull away from time to time while watching this disturbingly beautiful and very real film. It was too good to miss, though, and I'm glad you enjoyed it.
Oh, the ice cream cone con was classic. It really takes chutzpah to pull something like that off. The kids were naturals, exactly what the movie needed them to be. It's a little more surprising that Halley wasn't a professional actress. The director apparently was just a fan of her travel Instagram (?) and cast her on that basis. She seems to have done other stuff since, though.
Bobby is a great character, and I've never seen Dafoe better. The thing is, that kind of job generally selects people who are on the landlord's side, not necessarily on the tenants' side. Even if they're not totally indifferent, the people living there can be a handful (Halley obviously is) and it's easy to write them off. Bobby definitely cares, and he's smart, too.
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