Star quality:
Bria Vinaite and
Brooklynn Prince.DIRECTORSean Baker
CASTBria Vinaite, Brooklynn Prince,
Willem Dafoe, Mela Murder, Valeria Cotto,
Christopher Rivera, Caleb Landry Jones
PLOTIn a Florida motel run by Bobby (Dafoe),
Moonee (Prince) and her mother Halley (Vinaite)
lead a precarious existence without secure
accommodation. But while Halley struggles to
make ends meet, Moonee is largely oblivious to
her circumstances and runs wild with her friends.
OUT21 DECEMBER
RATEDMA15+/111 MINS
★★★★★
THE FLORIDA PROJECT
VERDICT Brimming with vitality, this is empathic
towards its subjects but fi ercely critical of the
system victimising them. The performances
of Vinaite, Dafoe and Prince will stay with you.out of the housing market after the sub-prime
crash and unable to fi nd traditional rental
accommodation. And it’s in this unenchanted
world that director Sean Baker sets his scene.
Baker’s last fi lm, the acclaimed Tangerine,
was shot on an iPhone in a style he called “pop
vérité”, a cheery, acid-bright approach to
potentially depressing subject matter. Here he
once again fi nds an eye-scorchingly colourful
location and uses fi rst-time actors, drawing
extraordinary performances from them. The
success of Tangerine has allowed him a veteran
movie star in Willem Dafoe’s caring motel
manager, and 35mm fi lm thanks to a (slightly)
higher budget. Yet Baker maintains the
same unwavering focus on the overlooked,
in particular six-year-old Moonee (Prince)
and her struggling mother, Halley (Vinaite).
Halley is a sometime exotic dancer who’s out
of work, so Moonee spends the holidays running
wild with her friends, scamming tourists for
money to buy an ice cream and exploring derelict
homes. Moonee seems to thrive despite her
lack of supervision and the real dangers she
sometimes meets, and it’s only through Halley’s
growing desperation and Bobby’s attempted
assistance that we become aware how fragile
her happiness is. Of course, as viewers your
heart will be in your mouth during many of heradventures, but she and her friends are blithely
unaware of any peril, casually playing while the
adults around them are ground down.
Innocence is the true magic kingdom here,
the bubble where Moonee giggles and plays, but
her lack of understanding and of consequence
can’t last forever. Halley — barely more than
a teenager herself — can’t fi nd steady work and
keeps having to choose the quick hustle over the
long-term plan to keep herself and her daughter
housed and fed. And while Bobby attempts to
offer some stability in the chaotic lives of his
clientele, his own hands are tied by rules made by
people with power over him, so there are limits to
what he can do without risking his own fragile
stability. The world always threatens to impinge
on Halley’s family’s tiny idyll, and it’s that
hanging shadow that gives the colourful
pop of childhood and sunshine its devastating
vérité element. Baker has placed a ferocious
condemnation of social injustice and inequality
at his fi lm’s heart, only partly camoufl aged by its
colour and lust for life. It’s a moving, emotional
masterpiece. HELEN O’HARAWALT DISNEY’S MAGIC Kingdom
opened in Florida in 1971, centred around
a fairytale castle that promised visitors a spell
in the happiest place on Earth. In its shadow,
motels popped up to cater to a steady infl ux
of tourists until, recently, these increasingly
run-down establishments found a new clientele:
Florida’s struggling working-class and
unemployed families. These were people locked