by Jason Adams
When I was eight years old my mother and I finally moved out of the room we had been renting since my parents had divorced into our own house. The house was so small the movers had to break our bed-frame in half to get it up the staircase, but it was ours. A house! A home. The day after we moved in the police showed up at our door and took my mother away - in order for us to get our own place she had stolen money from the laundromat she worked at. I went and lived with my grandmother for awhile after that.
I take films about poverty as a deeply serious business...
I didn't like Beasts of the Southern Wild because director Benh Zeitlin went too far in fantasizing Hushpuppy's hard reality - that was a deeply unpopular opinion at the time (and remains so, I think) but now that I'm seeing the same claims laid at the feet of The Florida Project I have to say (even though it's admittedly unfair to pit movies against each other like this) The Florida Project feels like a course correction to me. It rights what Southern Wild mistepped.
Moonee (Brooklynn Prince) lives in a world that begs for romanticization - Sean Baker's camera surrounds her with a Magic Kingdom, even if it is only the dank corners where the cockroaches have scuttled. Giant floating Wizard Heads and Ice Cream Cones Towers abound - you can see the gunk spackled over and the pink's a little too puce by way of puke, but you can see how a kid would look around and see another world.
Sean Baker does not make the same mistake. Moonee's world is never magical. There is no swell of majestic music, there is no parade of fantastical creatures around the corner. There is a pedophile from New Jersey standing in the parking lot. The children's screams are shrill, pointed, and the rooms they do their screaming in are small and have hard walls that echo. Even as his downtrodden characters charm us - Baker clearly loves every single person he puts inside his camera and feeds off their nasty wise humor of the doomed - we never lose sight of the squalor.
Nor should we. There was no romance that day I lay on that broken bed watching strange men cart my mother away. Poverty is often humiliating and desperate. No not always, but we get more than our fair share, and we're often forced to make ridiculous sacrifices - noble and ridiculous; useless pointless things the better-off can't even begin to comprehend. If a movie can't be honest about that then it does its subject a disservice. The Florida Project is deeply honest.