The Florida Project (2017)
Sean Baker is one of the more interesting independent voices working in American cinema right now, a filmmaker who has made a habit of finding stories in places mainstream Hollywood would rather not look. Before The Florida Project, he was perhaps best known for Tangerine (2015), a vivid, kinetic drama shot entirely on an iPhone 5S that followed two transgender sex workers across a single Christmas Eve in Los Angeles. That film announced Baker as someone genuinely committed to the margins, not as a tourist but as a patient, curious observer. The Florida Project arrived two years later to considerable awards-season noise, earning Willem Dafoe an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor and securing Baker a place in the wider conversation about American social realism. I also reviewed Tangerine and Anora, Baker's 2024 Palme d'Or winner, if you want a fuller picture of where this film sits in his career.
The film was written by Baker and his regular collaborator Chris Bergoch, the same partnership behind Tangerine, and produced through a trio of independent outfits including Cre Film and Freestyle Picture Company, the kind of modestly resourced production that suits Baker's observational, low-intervention style. The setting is the Magic Castle Inn, a garishly purple budget motel in Kissimmee, Florida, sitting in the long shadow cast by the Walt Disney World resort just down the road. That proximity is the film's central irony: the manufactured magic of one of the world's most visited tourist attractions exists cheek by jowl with a community of people living week to week in extended-stay motels, their children spending their summers unsupervised, building their own improvised kingdom from whatever the roadside provides. The story centres on six-year-old Moonee, played by Brooklynn Prince in a performance of startling, unforced naturalism, and her mother Halley, played by first-time actress Bria Vinaite, whom Baker discovered via Instagram. The casting of non-professionals alongside experienced actors is a deliberate strategy, and one that gives the film much of its texture.
Cinematographer Alexis Zabé shoots the Florida sprawl in wide, sun-drenched frames that make the roadside architecture, the discount shops and the ice cream parlours and the painted motel walls, look almost painterly without softening their edges. There is a particular visual logic to the way the camera stays low, closer to a child's eyeline, giving the scrubby grass verges and parking lots the scale of open countryside. The colours are saturated to the point of mild surreality, the purple of the motel walls, the orange of a Waffle House sign, which quietly underlines the film's interest in the gap between the world as children imagine it and the world as it actually is. Lorne Balfe's score is used sparingly, leaving much of the film to ambient sound and the noise of children at play. Baker, who also edited the film himself, cuts with a loose, episodic rhythm that mirrors the shapelessness of a long, unstructured summer.
I like Sean Baker a good deal. Tangerine and Anora are both films of his I rate highly, so I came to The Florida Project expecting to be won over, and instead found myself fairly cold on it.
It follows a group of young children running wild around a budget motel on the fringes of Disney World, and the badly behaved adults who are meant to be raising them. And for me, that is more or less where it begins and ends.
My problem is that I kept waiting for a deeper story to surface, and it never did. There is clearly an attempt at social observation here, a portrait of life lived on the margins, but I found it so on the nose that it never deepened into the commentary it seemed to be reaching for. Scene after scene of unruly kids and feckless grown-ups wore me down rather than drew me in, and without a stronger thread holding it all together I struggled to find much to grip onto.
Willem Dafoe is the saving grace, a warm, weary, decent presence as the motel manager, and comfortably the standout of the thing. I can see that plenty of people respond to this film far more than I did, and I do not doubt the empathy behind it. It simply did not land for me. Two and a half stars, a rare miss, to my mind, from a director I will happily keep watching.
The Florida Project is a film with genuine admirers, and the enthusiasm it generated on the festival circuit was not manufactured. The questions it raises about childhood, poverty, and what it means to grow up in the margins of American plenty are real and worth asking. Whether it answers them to your satisfaction is another matter, and responses to the film tend to split fairly cleanly along those lines. For a companion piece on another film preoccupied with outsiders and the awkward edges of suburban America, see also my review of Ghost World. Baker remains a filmmaker worth watching closely, which, given the evidence of his wider career, makes The Florida Project all the more curious as a talking point. Sometimes the kingdom stays just out of reach.
Rating: ★★½ | Year: 2017 | Watched: 2026-10-04
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for The Florida Project (2017) on YouTube
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