The Florida Project ** (2017, Willem Dafoe, Brooklynn Prince, Bria Vinaite) – Movie Review

Willem Dafoe gives a knockout performance as the anxiety-ridden manager of a down-at-heel Florida motel in the environs of Disney World. Layered, textured and fascinating, it is certainly one of the best performances this always interesting actor has given.

He inhabits this alien landscape like he’s lived there all his life. It is motel hotel, and a bit of his moderate brain realises he is in hell, though the clients around him are just grateful to be there. It is purgatory, a place between heaven and hell, but hell anyway.

Writer-director Sean Baker’s follow-up to Tangerine (2015) is atmospheric and looks smart and imaginative, but it is also quite hard-going and over-praised. Apart from Dafoe, all the other actors and characters are the kind of people you don’t want to spend any time with, especially two hours with.

Brooklynn Prince is fairly infuriating as the precocious six-year-old heroine Moonee, who hangs out with other badly behaved kids. It’s not their fault, of course, it’s the parents, in this case the mom. Bria Vinaite does play the girl’s rebellious but caring mom well, but she is such a mess-up that it is hard to sympathise at all with her character, as she descends into prostitution and drugs. She is one bad mom, not like the Bad Moms moms, just one bad mom, with good intentions maybe but on the road to hell and taking her child down there with her.

The film is a series of incidents and has no story to tell, though it does have a poorly achieved, melodramatic conclusion, followed by a hugely mistaken coda in Disney World.

With the characters so desperate, this movie is a dour and depressing experience, sending you away more miserable than when you arrived. And the ambiguous ending, with Moonee headed towards the Magic Kingdom, that could either mean hope, escape or irony, doesn’t help.

I’m reading here that the Odeon cinemas in the UK made it their Screen Unseen movie and disgruntled people started walking out after 30 minutes. Personally, I’ve not yet met a single person who didn’t like it, but then they have all been film critics.

© Derek Winnert 2017 Movie Review

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