REVIEW: The Florida Project

This was alright. It is basically a film about nothing, though.  Much like Tangerine, Baker goes cinéma vérité again as we basically just drop in to the life of a few trashy characters as they go about their business.  In The Florida Project, we follow a mother and her daughter while they do nothing for a few weeks over summer break.  The mother (in the thinnest sense of the word) is a complete leech, a thief, and a prostitute, trying to accumulate money to pay each week's rent.  This isn't an empowering single mum story.  Basically a girl herself, she has no morals or good judgement, and any money she does get she wastes on fast food.  Bobby (Willem Dafoe), the motel manager, is a great character -- the only one in the film!  The rest are the lowest of the low.  The kids aren't much better either, but I gave them a pass because they're just kids.  But still, Moonee is a little bitch.  But I can't say I was bored watching these people for a 110 minutes.

This is a far superior film to Tangerine, the only other Baker film I've seen.  The editing might be a bit off, there is largely no score, and the film misses out on glorious opportunities to evoke real emotion (editing works against this film), but much like reality TV, you just cannot take your eyes off the screen.  You don't know what will happen next.  It has such a compulsive nature to it, which helps even more that the film has an anchor in Willem Dafoe.  I hoped there would be a tangent for Bobby, but sadly it never comes.  Actually, a film about his character running the place (which this halfheartedly was anyway) would have been far more interesting.

B