‘The Florida Project’ Looks At Childhood And Poverty In The Shadow Of Disney

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What to Stream This Weekend

Movie: The Florida Project
Director: Sean Baker
Starring: Willem Dafoe, Brooklynn Prince, Bria Vinaite, Caleb Landry Jones
Available on: Amazon Prime and iTunes

I genuinely don’t know how I’d feel about going to Disney World after seeing The Florida Project. For the grand majority of the film, Disney isn’t seen or spoken of, but it’s an ever-present reality at the edges of everything that happens. It’s the economic behemoth down the road whose largesse never quite trickles down. It’s the tourist trap that is nearly hermetically sealed to keep its visitors inside its bubble. But as with every bubble, there are those who find themselves on the outside, and these are the people The Florida Project is concerned with. They live at the roadside motels with names like The Magic Castle, designed to evoke that Disney magic without infringing on any copyrights. They work low-paying service jobs, or they don’t work at all. They’re behind on their week-to-week rent payments. They scam or beg from whatever wayward tourists find themselves outside the bubble. And their ill-behaved kids run absolutely wild, yelling back at adults, spitting on car hoods, dripping their ice cream all over the floors — in other words, they’re being kids.

The Florida Project opens on Moonee, six years old, and two little friends at the motel. They holler for each other at the top of their lungs for no real reason, they take turns spitting on cars from the second floor because why not, they sass back at the adults that yell at them, they run away, the stomp through fields and make trouble and are generally exactly the kind of little monsters kids usually are. One of the great beauties of director Sean Baker’s (Tangerine) film is that he never loses sight of two things about these kids (and particularly Moonee): 1) they’re not being raised right, between the poverty and the fact that, in Moonee’s case, her mom encourages her worst impulses and is a terrible example, and 2) they’re still just kids. They’re not “innocent” or pure or anything the movies often hold them up as. They’re not funny because they’ve got wisecracks, though they absolutely are funny. They’re funny because they’re loud and unbothered in that way kids are. There are exchanges in this movie between kids that will have you falling out (“Don’t be a loser!” “Don’t call me that, but okay!”). As a result, Moonee and her pals — in one of the films great touches, she starts the movie hanging out with two boys and via the transient nature of childhood ends the film palling around with another girl altogether — become some of the most compelling, realistic, and lovable (despite the fact that they are objectively little monsters) protagonists in any film last year.

The kids aren’t the only reason to watch, though. Willem Dafoe’s Oscar-nominated performance as Bobby, the motel manager and human definition of the word “beleagured,” is just about perfect. He gets endless grief from his tenants, he has to hound people for rent weekly (which means daily), these kids keep making mischief for him, and yet you get the very clear sense that there’s nothing he’d rather be doing. There’s a mix of exasperation and paternal affection he keeps in balance at all times. Bobby isn’t some benevolent saint looking after the poor and downtrodden, nor is he the heavy that some — Mooney’s mom Hailey, for one — want to make him out to be. He’s just got his little corner of the universe, and he spends his days and nights trying to make that little corner as good a place as circumstances will allow.

As Hailey, the previously unheard-of Bria Vinaite is astounding. Brooklynn Prince has been getting a ton of attention for playing Moonee, but as with any performance by a child that young, it’s impossible to know what is acting, what is simply existing, and how much has been molded by the director. With Vinaite, though, it’s remarkable how this heretofore nonprofessional actress was able to create the incredibly maddening woman — who childishly flaunts her bad behavior and grifts without remorse and resorts to one brutally ugly scene of physical violance — who nevertheless feels real enough that we can’t just write her off. It’s never less than fully complicated with this woman; she clearly loves her daughter, but she’s just as clearly bad for her.

That this is all happening in the literal shadow of Disney, in an entire underground economy meant to operate in that company’s margins, is never lost on Baker or on the viewers. The film’s ending, where Disney is confronted most directly, could be taken a few ways. It’s a fairy tale ending for a character who deeply deserves it (though the audience has to sit in the knowledge that it’s a lie); or is it an every-little-girl-deserves-to-be-a-princess-for-a-day message, which is almost but critically not the same thing as the first option; or is it a literal jailbreak that opens the door to a whole other movie we can only imagine. I wasn’t initially totally sold on the ending, mostly because I initially saw the middle option as the true one. But the more I think about it and watch it again, it feels like the first and third are equally possible, and it gives the whole movie an open-ended air of magic in a way that I think it’s earned for the ice-cream-smeared faces of its main characters.

Where to stream The Florida Project