It’s a virulently lilac three-story motel called The Magic Castle, complete with fake crenellations, and it’s nobody’s idea of a paradise. Well, nobody over the age of 10, maybe. To the rambunctious, irrepressible, mischievous 6-year-old Moonee (instant tiny superstar Brooklynn Prince) and her friends Scooty (Christopher Rivera) and Jancey (Valeria Cotto), the juvenile leads of Sean Baker‘s bristling and delightful “The Florida Project,” it’s a domain of endless possibility and adventure. Down the strip, there may be a much more famous Kingdom, where the princesses twirl and simper and seldom accidentally set fire to abandoned condos, but Moonee has a magic power more valuable than the ability to grow her hair or fall asleep for a long time. With the perpetual motion machine that is her fertile, scattershot imagination (sample dialogue: “If I had a pet alligator, I’d call it Anne” followed immediately by “Oh look! Ghost poop!”), she can transform her unlovely realm, characterized by grinding poverty, into the Happiest Place on Earth.
The infectious joy of a long childhood summer is brilliantly and boldly brought to life, unfolding, like Baker’s vital last film “Tangerine,” in a vivid present tense. (Is there any director now working less in thrall to the sentimental seduction of nostalgia?) But the deceptive intelligence of “The Florida Project” is how immersive this bouncy-castle reality is while sitting exactly on top of the drawn-out, unremarked tragedy that is life on the margins of respectable, solvent society. It hardly seems possible that Moonee’s young mom Halley (Bria Vinaite), a pugnacious, trash-talking, tattooed ex-stripper, could be downwardly mobile, but her increasingly desperate financial situation is the slow descending background drone to Moonee’s piping lead vocal.
Halley and Moonee, like many other people in similarly straitened circumstances, live a week-to-week existence in the motel, which is run by Bobby (Willem Dafoe, atypically, but satisfyingly cast as the kindest of careworn men). Moonee spends her days having spitting contests, playing hide and seek, grifting money for ice creams, and generally exploring the scrubby backlots of her realm. And all of this is portrayed without a hint of condescension, either to Moonee’s social status or to her age or stature. In fact, if Baker has a signature shot (here he’s shooting with Carlos Reygadas‘ regular DP Alexis Zabe on 35mm, as opposed to the iPhone cameras he used to such great effect on ‘Tangerine’), it’s the low-down camera angled slightly upward at his actors, making this little 6-year-old seem “Bad Boys” heroic at times.
Our love for Moonee is instantaneous and total, but we come to care deeply for Halley too. Nobody’s ideal of a mother figure, she nonetheless effortlessly loves her daughter, seldom loses her temper with her, and tries instinctively hard not to let Moonee in on the misery and perilousness of their circumstances. Whether sitting on the Magic Castle’s picnic tables eating waffles smuggled out of the local diner by a friend or “Paper Moon“-ing their way around the more affluent hotels nearby peddling knock-off perfume, it’s gorgeous to see a mother-child relationship in which they both get such a conspiratorial kick out of each other. But unlike for Moonee, and the other kids who grow wild and bright as weeds through an endless summer, for Halley time does pass and things do change, and not every day is the same as the last. Oftentimes, it’s worse.
There is an extraordinary skill in how Baker seeds these changes while seemingly never losing the focus on the happy. Slivers of reality intrude, like a sudden stab of sadness when a family is moving out, their car so overstuffed that there’s no room for a box of toys. Giving the toys out to Moonee and the others, the father promises his crestfallen son, “All new toys when we get to New Orleans, ok? All new toys!” But there’s something in his voice and the way the gaping trunk is tied down with rope that makes us certain this move is no fresh start. Sudden strokes of good luck don’t seem to happen here, instead, the trajectory is downward. Like when we first see Moonee playing with her dolls in the bath in a scene that seems simply another enjoyable slice of time spent with her. But the second time she’s there, soaping up her Barbie doll’s hair, these long bathing sessions are subtly revealed to have a different purpose: they are to get Moonee out of the room where the bed is.
So beware: although there are fewer happier cinematic experiences you could have than spending time with Moonee and co., Baker is giving you all this giddy, indolent lazy-days delight the better to break your heart. It’s seldom a Cannes audience has been so instantly reduced to rubble as that moment when Moonee, who has among her many character flaws not one shred of self-pity, has the light and the play drain from her pretty face as she starts, for the first and only time, to cry.
There is nothing lyrical or romanced about this portrait of poverty, though it is very beautiful to look at. This isn’t the dreamy magic realism of “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” nor the gritty social realism of Ken Loach. Instead, it’s an intensely felt palimpsest of joy and despair and a stealthy way to drive home Baker’s furiously humane point. Though Bobby keeps it clean, runs it fairly, and tries to protect its inhabitants, it’s not much to look at, yet The Magic Castle costs Halley $1000 a month. This alone is a startling reminder of how very expensive it is to be poor, in a world where wealth is not about how much you have, but how much people think you’re worth. Challenging the invisibility of a whole segment of the American underclass, “The Florida Project” shines a bright shaft of happy, hot summer sun on The Magic Castle and finds there no magic, but hidden treasure. [A]
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