so close yet so far
by
Douglas Messerli
Sean
Baker and Chris Bergoch (screenplay), Sean Baker (director) The Florida Project / 2017
As
in Sean Baker’s earlier film Tangerine,
his film The Florida Project deals
with individuals who most of his audiences would never have otherwise met.
Baker does not sentimentalize these figures but is able to create sympathetic
portraits that help us all to comprehend, in this case, families at the lowest
end of the economic spectrum—particularly in Moonee’s case (6-year old Brooklynn Kimberly Prince, the
real star of this film), a mother, Halley (Bria Vinaite) who finds it difficult
to raise even the $38 a-week necessary to stay in the low-budget motel, one of
several lying just outside the gates of Kissimee, Florida’s Walt Disney World. The Disney office originally called the new construction of Disney World near Orlando, "The Florida Project."
The names of these motels, The Magic
Castle, Futureland, etc. almost mock the tourist paradise. Yet Moonee and her
friends, Scooty, Jancey, Dicky and others will never be able to afford the
entry to that magic kingdom and are left alone to roam the scruffy urban
territory throughout most of every day. Living the hardscrabble lives they do,
these kids are tough and, like many young children everywhere, find ways they
can to get into trouble: spitting on the windshield of cars below the
second-story balcony of the motel, shutting down the electricity to their
building, spying on a topless elderly sunbather woman by the pool, and, in the
worst of their delinquent activities, accidentally setting on fire an empty condominium
home, which results in Scooty (Christopher Rivera) being removed from the
children’s group when his father perceives his son’s involvement in the fire.
Yet Moonee—and by extension, we suspect,
many of her childhood friends—also has serious responsibilities, collecting
each day the waffles one of Halley’s friends hands out the back door of the
restaurant in which she works, and gathering up provisions from a local church
food-bank truck.
In fact, we suspect this little “pistol”
of a child is more morally responsible that her childlike mother, who, after
losing her job as a pole dancer takes up prostitution in her room, locking away
her daughter in the bathroom wherein the young girl plays with her plastic
toys, creating a kind of imaginary Disneyland for herself. If nothing else, she
is the film’s emblem of imaginative thinking, at one point taking her
adventurous followers on a tour of what she describes as “Safari Land,” a field
of cows.
Almost like Tatum O’Neal in Paper Moon, Moonee plays a wonderful con
when her mother buys up perfumes and soaps at a local wholesale shop and sells
them to tourists at higher prices. Yet at other moments the child in her comes
out as she lags behind her mother to create “sandcastles” in the mud outside
one of the hotels. At one point earlier, just to get enough coins to purchase an
ice-cream cone for herself and her friends, Moonee approaches a stranger:
Moonee:
[to tourist at ice-cream stand] Excuse me. Could you give us some
change, please? The doctor said we have asthma and we have to eat ice-cream
right away.
If
there is any true hero in this ragtag community, it is The Magic Castle’s manager,
Bobby Hicks (the always wonderful Willem Defoe), who must play bad cop to many
of his customers, including 
Moonee’s mother, while still gently protecting their
kids, scolding them while simultaneously trying to protect them from the nudity
of his elderly customer and, most importantly, scaring off a creepy man—obviously
a potential child predator—while yet offering these poverty-stricken kids a
place to hang out in the lobby and even hide under his protected computer space
in one of their hide-and-seek games. He is a kind of hidden saint in a world of
no saintliness.
If
there is any one father who might responsibly care for them, it is this gentle,
hard-working, janitor, care-taker, and enforcer for those, like Halley, who
constantly break the motel rules. But even his caring ministrations have a
limit, particularly when Moonee’s mother steals Disney passes from one of her
clients and then charges a huge breakfast with her and Moonee at the very
restaurant where her now former
friend works—to the same man’s account. Halley’s robbery is clearly a step too
far, beyond even the prostitution which has cost her the friend she had long
counted on.
It is almost inevitable, after the fire
and Halley’s robbery, that workers from Florida Department of Children and
Families (DCF) show up at Halley’s door to take the child into public custody.
Moonee, now perceiving her destiny, quickly runs off, her mother chastising the
officers:
Halley:
[while being confronted by CPS after Moonee runs away] You just let her
get away? And I'm the one who's unfit? FUCK YOU!
Moonee proclaims that she is off to the
Magic Kingdom, and although we never know and certainly doubt she might ever be
able to enter it, we do know that through her imagination she might enter
another world even more remarkable. The director himself wrote of enigmatic
ending:
We've
been watching Moonee use her imagination and wonderment throughout the entire
film to make the best of the situation she's in—she can't go to Disney's Animal
Kingdom, so she goes to the 'safari' behind the motel and looks at cows; she
goes to the abandoned condos because she can't go to the Haunted Mansion. And
in the end, with this inevitable drama, this is me saying to the audience, “If
you want a happy ending, you're gonna have to go to that headspace of a kid
because, here, that's the only way to achieve it.”
Moonee and her kind can only seek
salvation in their heads. There is little room for them on earth, and it is
only in her daily wanderings that she might find a place to live out her
dreams.
Los Angeles, November
21, 2017
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