Sean Baker Focuses on the Hidden Homeless in "The Florida Project"

Vibrant, daring, and emotionally devastating, The Florida Project will completely capture your heart before it breaks it. Its seven-year-old star Brooklynn Prince plays Moonee, an irresistible ball of energy living with her ex-stripper mother Halley (Bria Vinaite) in a rundown motel called The Magic Castle on the outskirts of Disney World. It’s a glaringly ironic name for a place where the two barely scrape by, as Halley devises desperate ways to come up with the rent each week. At the same time, there is something achingly sincere to the description, as Moonee experiences her days in and around the motel as her own scrappy kingdom – an endless source of thrills, distractions, and escapades.

Sean Baker's film recalls Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012) in the way it filters its precarious castaway world through the imagination of a six-year-old girl. There is a similar vividness to its cinematography, which, in contrast to the director's iPhone-crafted Tangerine (2015), was shot on 35mm film. “There is something that film has that digital doesn’t,” he told Film Comment. “It’s that organic quality – something living and breathing in the celluloid. I wanted the audience to be living in and feeling Orlando.” It was a brilliant choice. Every moment of The Florida Project possesses the tactile, color-infused intensity of a place magnified through a child’s perspective. As cinematographer Alexis Zabe follows Moonee and her friends, the camera’s tracking movements are like those of a kite, zipping through Disney World's outskirts.

Nothing about the film, however, romanticizes its characters’ poverty. While writing the script for The Florida Project, Baker took a thoroughly journalistic approach, making trips to Orlando to interview motel residents and managers, hiring them as extras on the set, and soliciting their feedback. He also read news stories sent to him by his co-screenwriter Chris Bergoch, who grew up close to Orlando’s budget motels and had first given him the idea to make a film about these families living on the brink of homelessness. “I'm just responding to what I’m not seeing in U.S. cinema right now," Baker said. "There are filmmakers out there attempting it, but we don’t see the bigger studios doing it, and they’re the ones reaching a greater audience.”

In his effort to pull social realities out of the shadows, Baker steers clear of simplistic messages. He could have made a villain out of any one of his characters – by casting the motel manager Bobby (Willem Dafoe) as an unforgiving tyrant, or Halley as a monstrous mother, or the social workers as the agents of a cruel impersonal system. But Baker knows that such explanations would amount to no more than a false catharsis, a black-and-white reading of a broken world.

Each of his characters is far more complex, and deeply human. Willem Dafoe nails his role as Bobby, a man torn between his urge to protect his tenants (particularly Moonee) and the realities of keeping his business afloat. Then, there’s Halley’s polarizing presence. She’s a strong-willed hothead whose behavior and drug addiction pose a serious risk to her daughter, but she’s also a fighter who will do anything to keep a roof over Moonee’s head. Their bond is brought to life by two previously unknown actresses, Bria Vinaite, whom Baker found on Instagram, and the precocious Brooklynn Prince. Similar to the Oscar-winning short Sing (2016), The Florida Project is a testament to the untapped potential of using child actors and has spurred talk of a Best Supporting Actress nomination for Prince.

Given The Florida Project’s unique focus on children, it is not surprising that Baker mentioned The Little Rascals as one of his inspirations. Its comedic streak, however, is constantly in tension with bleak realities that make it very similar to Tangerine, as well as to other recently-released films about people trying to survive on the edges of capitalism. In the vein of American Honey (2016), The Florida Project blurs the moral boundaries between financial desperation and dishonest schemes, as Halley sells overpriced perfumes and stolen Disney wristbands to avoid her only alternatives: prostitution or eviction. With the scenes of her and Moonee merrily hoarding items inside the 99-cent store with the money they conned off of tourists – and of their neighborhood celebrating the incineration of a derelict condo – Baker also delivers a scathing commentary on the sinkhole of American capitalism that possesses similar elements to this year’s radical festival documentary Fraud (2016).

The Florida Project, however, derives such heart-wrenching power from its social themes that I cannot help but return to my initial comparison of the film with Beasts of the Southern Wild. Both are propelled by their young protagonists’ defiant sense of adventure in the peripheral wastelands they inhabit and culminate in a fantasy sequence that builds to an aching emotional pitch. Just before we see Moonee take her friend’s hand for one last Orlando excursion, Baker switches back to his iPhone aesthetic, infusing the moments that follow with hyperreal brilliance. The final shot of the iconic Cinderella Castle behind them glitters like a vision before the screen goes black. It is in this moment that your heart will crack, as you watch Moonee retreat into fantasy, trying to recover the only world she knows as home – The Magic Castle – before it is wrenched from her grasp.