A different perspective of childhood innocence written and directed by Sean Baker and starring incredible performances from Willem Dafoe, Bria Vinaitte, and Brooklynn Prince as the 6-year old star.
The Florida Project is another ambitious story from A24, an indie art film powerhouse behind Lady Bird, Moonlight, The Lobster, The Witch, Ex Machina, and more. What makes The Florida Project so potent is its riveting portrayal of extreme feminine poverty while trying to manage a realization that Disney’s fairytale ending might not be coming after all. The film itself did not make much money and even lost it’s award this Oscar season to Guillermo Del Toro’s dark tale of the little mermaid, The Shape of Water proving that we are still not ready to talk about the stark reality of what Disney culture and mythos have done.
Most of the time Moonee is alone or with a transient team of other young children who are being raised by single parents in the Magic Kingdom Motel outside of Disney land. All of the scenery is magical realism. Pastel colors, giant princesses, and romantic fairy tale street signs are all as part of the movie as the blatant poverty and hopelessness that also penetrates the film. I have seen a similar movie called Forbidden Games which was directed by René Clémente in 1952. IMDB briefly describes the movie as “A young French girl orphaned in a Nazi air attack is befriended by the son of a poor farmer, and together they try to come to terms with the realities of death.” The situations are different but the feeling is modernized to fit our generation’s clear problem with nihilism and defeatism in our everyday life. Both movies showcase ignorance and innocence in the face of extremely unwelcoming living environments.
Halley (Bria Vinaitte) is a mother I’ve known as a child whose own immaturity and highly defensive personality make for her humanity and her fatal flaw as a character. Trying to tread water on her weekly hotel bill by selling perfumes to wealth(-ier) tourists, Bria displays her outstanding acting in her breakthrough role as Halley by showing her character’s natural charisma which makes her an odd anti-hero. Teaching her daughter the art of survival on the Floridian street of hard knocks her daughter, Moonee, learns valuable lessons in alternative resources to survive including a food pantries, strategic situational nuances, and simply asking others for money to get by and even sometimes what you want such as a simple pleasure of ice cream on a sweltering humid summer day outside of Orlando.
Willem Dafoe plays the leading male role in the film as the tentative but understanding patriarch of the hotel where many of these families live and hope to establish as their residency. In one scene, he witnesses and handles a predator who is making his mark on a group of unsupervised children which includes Mooney and her best friend Jacey. In a horrifyingly well-acted scene, we witness the feeble-bodied old man become quickly overpowered and humiliated when it becomes obvious that his attempts were dishonest. A chilling reminder that while some people may seem pathetic and vulnerable that these pariahs are not deemed so by people who are physically impeded by size, age, and intelligence.
While no one watching the film can say that Moonee’s needs are being met by Halley there is no doubt that there is love for her daughter. In fact, Halley’s thigh tattoos show a Mother and Daughter angel cuddling on her left and on her right is a Moon, both are a monument for her daughter, and they are the most identifiable objects on Halley’s body. Later these are the identification for Halley’s sexually suggestive Instagram photos that are used as further proof by another single mom living in the hotel that Halley is unfit to give care. When Halley is confronted by her best friend as a degenerate, Halley’s rage and embarrassment take over and she physically assaults Ashley (Mela Murder) to whom she had looked at as a compatriot and equal in their misery. Moonee is ironically the photographer a feat that I have seen Kim Kardashian use on her own. Whether this gives any concrete evidence that this act makes her a bad mother I cannot say, but Halley is only a child herself and a product of her environment and we are watching the evolutionary deterioration before our eyes.
When Children in youth come we are neither relieved nor upset that they are now a part of the narrative. They are fighting a battle with little understanding or resources of lives they are coming into. Less like fairy godmothers and more like the ugly wicked witches who’ve come to separate the family akin to the tragic preamble in many of Disney’s own movies. However it is evident that even the authorities sent to help are ill prepared for the reality and exacerbate the situation to a traumatic head leaving Mooney and her best friend to run-away to the Magic Castle while her mother does the only thing that life has taught her, which is the other end of the parasympathetic nervous system reaction, to fight the ones who are trying to take away the last semblance of joy in her life.
Having The Florida Project overlooked for The Shape of Water is a good mirror of today, we are still more interested in a happy ending than addressing the real problems of feminine poverty and the challenges of raising a child without a partner and too young, a diagnosis that could have been prevented if love had not been prescribed and force fed down our throats since infancy. While we might not be there in the mainstream media, and one might argue that media might not even be the way to enact change although there has been substantial research that by observing difficult situations of others through stories we are able to build mirror neurons which will (in theory) make us more empathetic as a culture and as a people something that AFI and the Austin Film Critics Association among others (nod to the Alliance of Women Film Journalists who gave two awards to The Florida Project’s Willem Dafoe and Brooklynn Prince) have taken steps to make sure that film projects such as these are getting the recognition and respect they need.
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