You’re telling me you haven’t seen Sean Baker’s 2015 film Tangerine? The widely well-received, somehow-gorgeous indie feature shot entirely on iPhones? The one that follows a pair of transgender sex workers over the course of a day in Hollywood? All right, stop reading this. Go watch it. Step away from this review — put your phone down, set the paper back on the coffee table for a moment, whatever. Tangerine is on Netflix. Watch it right now. I’ll wait.
Now, wasn’t that something? Sets the bar pretty high for Baker’s follow-up, The Florida Project, doesn’t it? Well, the good news is, despite a significantly more substantial budget and crew and heightened expectations from critics and fans alike, Baker’s latest doesn’t fall flat. In fact, it soars. It might rip your guts to shreds just a little bit, but it’ll be worth it.
Just outside Orlando, Fla. — Kissimmee, specifically — bright and plucky 6-year-old Moonee lives with her mom Hailey in an extended-stay hotel. Hailey is a troubled mom, a former stripper who can’t seem to land a job because of her criminal record. But Moonee and her fellow hotel-dwelling ankle-biters make the most of their existence at the electric-purple Magic Castle Inn & Suites, spitting on cars and bumming ice-cream money from strangers. They’re surrounded by Disney souvenir shops and streets with names like “Seven Dwarfs Lane,” and the irony of these characters’ circumstances shouldn’t be lost on anyone: Tourists from far and wide make a sojourn to Disney’s nearby land of fantasy, but in the shadow of Cinderella Castle live scores of impoverished kids and disenfranchised adults. Hope is a distant thing, and fantasy is hard to come by when this week’s rent is due at the Magic Castle.
Hailey and Moonee get by however they can, selling knockoff cologne to tourists and sneaking free meals from the nearby diner. Baker’s wide establishing shots are slow and languid, stretching out like the sweltering summer afternoons they depict. Viewers familiar with Central Florida — or really, with any Southern hellscape full of failing strip malls and sun-scorched, cracked-asphalt parking lots — will recognize these settings. There’s the dialysis center and the abandoned townhouses, and the more idiosyncratic locales lend themselves to Baker’s big, beautiful shots — Kissimmee’s Orange World and Crazy Wizard Gift Shop are just begging for screen time, and they get plenty of it here. Everything is magenta and blaze orange, like a Florida sunset.
Baker is a spiritual cousin of fellow arthouse darling Harmony Korine, probing the everyday with a careful eye toward the maligned, the misunderstood, the outcast. But where Korine painted dismal or meandering portraits with early work like Gummo, Baker reaches toward the sentimental. There’s a message in here somewhere, he’s sure of it, and he’ll bring it to the surface one way or another. His characters don’t deliver grand soliloquies, and Moonee and her friends don’t suffer from Improbably Wise Child Syndrome — you’ll no doubt find countless Florida Project reviews calling Moonee “precocious,” but really, she’s just a kid. Funnier than most, more of a smartass than most, living in much tougher circumstances than most, but just a kid. Baker isn’t interested in inflating these characters, making them martyrs or heroes or villains. They’re just people. The people you see hitchhiking but never pick up. The woman you saw asking for a buck in the parking lot. The people whose circumstances are sad to think about, so you just don’t think about them.
And then, importantly, there’s Bobby, the manager and de facto father figure at the Magic Castle, played with perfect subtlety by Willem Dafoe — perhaps his most endearing performance since he was The Life Aquatic’s ornery, loyal and easily wounded Klaus Daimler. Bobby’s craggy face and deep-set eyes hint at stories he never gets to tell, though young character actor Caleb Landry Jones (Get Out, Twin Peaks) does show up for just a touch of exposition in two scenes. Bobby is fierce when a potential child predator shows up at the Magic Castle, stern when Hailey breaks the rules, playful when Moonee needs a hide-and-seek spot, and ready with a daddish “fowl” pun when three wild cranes block his hotel’s drive-thru lane. But when the film’s other shoe drops — the shoe we’re waiting on the whole movie — Bobby is no superhero. He’s just a dude, a victim of circumstance, same as any of us.
Some folks might be jolted by the tonal shift at film’s end, but for me, it worked. Like Tangerine, The Florida Project has the unmistakable feeling of hyper-reality — in part due to Baker’s affinity for using first-time actors — and in reality, folks like this exist. They exist, and there’s no easy way out of their circumstances. To his credit, Baker doesn’t manufacture some fantastical exit strategy for his characters. All he asks is that we pay attention to them.
