OVP: The Florida Project (2017)

Film: The Florida Project (2017)
Stars: Brooklynn Prince, Bria Vinaite, Willem Dafoe, Valeria Cotto, Christopher Rivera
Director: Sean Baker
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Supporting Actor-Willem Dafoe)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 5/5 stars

When the year-end glut of Oscar season starts to happen, unfortunately sacrifices have to be made.  Movies that I would have inevitably seen in July seem to quickly be relegated to my Netflix queue, perhaps never to be recovered (that list is so long I genuinely have no idea if it will ever actually be completed), and so in the process I sometimes don't see a movie if it doesn't have a serious shot at an Oscar nomination, probably in a major category.  This is my roundabout way of telling you that, no, I've never seen Tangerine and will almost assuredly have to after The Florida Project, an ambitious and electrically good movie that will surely have you pondering the picture over-and-over in your head as you leave the theater.

(Spoilers Ahead, and I mean it this time) The movie takes place in Orlando, in the world of extended-stay motels where a young girl Moonee (Prince) lives with her mother Halley (Vinaite).  Halley is a doting mother, but not what you'd stereotypically call a good influence.  She frequently smokes, swears, and acts bawdily in front of her daughter, which Moonee has started to pick up on; in the opening scenes, Moonee and two of her friends are caught spitting on a woman's car and yelling obscenities at her.  The film unfolds as we watch Moonee throughout the summer explore her world of motels and tacky-themed restaurants (the kind you drive by on your way to Branson or Reno), all in the shadow of the childhood fairyland that is Orlando, just miles away from her tiny motel-room home.  While this is happening, we see Moonee's mother become slowly unhinged, eventually becoming a prostitute and stealing from her clients to make rent, and becoming more isolated and violent as the picture continues.

The movie feels almost like a documentary.  Aside from Willem Dafoe (and in a small part, Caleb Landry Jones) serving as reminders that this is a narrative picture, we are treated to almost completely first-time actors taking these parts.  This wouldn't work if the actors weren't excellent, but they are.  Prince has a marvelous naturalism as a child performer, in many ways recalling Quvenzhane Wallis and Jacob Tremblay in their iconic roles in Beasts of the Southern Wild and Room, respectively.  She makes Moonee seem like a real kid, one that is clearly forced into a level of faux-maturity and whose world hangs on the edge of a knife, with her mother not even living paycheck-to-paycheck, but handout-to-handout.  Equally good is Vinaite, who finds a perfect balance between entitlement, indignation, and rage in her mother.  It would be easy to cast Halley as the villain of this story, but Vinaite gives her so much full humanity that you can't quite get there.  Rounding out the ensemble is Dafoe, who is sublime as the hotel manager whose motives are largely unknown.  He seems to care about Halley and Moonee, but abandons them when perhaps they need his understanding most.  Which brings us to the part of the movie that feels the most ripe for controversy: the ending.

The picture itself ends where we'd anticipate it would end up, with Halley being called on by child protective service's after beating up her former friend and being caught soliciting online.  The ending moments are harrowing, with Halley indignantly yelling "F@#% You" to child protective services as they beg her to help convince Moonee to go along with the arrangement (that's the end of her character-a closeup, screamed profanity, and then we never see her again), Dafoe coolly smoking a cigarette behind the building, knowing what is unfolding but not trying to stop it as he feels covered morally by the comfort of a higher authority taking the blame even if it means that perhaps both these women's lives are in shambles, and Moonee desperately trying to convince her friend that they need to say goodbye, sobbing uncontrollably and finally betraying her age as a scared young girl realizing her play life is about to unravel.  The film then shifts away from a 35mm film to an iPhone camera, and for the first time in the picture we hear a background score, with Moonee and her friend running all the way into Disney's Magic Kingdom.  Disney is never mentioned by name, but it's specter of a "better life" is felt throughout the movie, and this is the first time we see any of its iconography as Cinderella's castle perches in the distance.  It's not entirely clear if the movie has now totally given in to Moonee's world of imagination we've seen so often or if she's meant to have actually escaped to a world promised to all children, but given to only the privileged few.  Either way, people have opinions on it, some saying it's a beautiful and fitting ending, in many ways reminiscent of The 400 Blows, and in other ways some thought it was a copout, a way for Baker to end the picture without thinking of an actual ending.

I was initially in the latter camp, and thought what a shame it was that the ending to such a marvelous movie could come about in such a way, but the more I thought about it, the more it felt right.  Moonee clearly didn't go to DisneyWorld, and in fact likely started a life bereft of magic after this moment, so one last flight of fancy seemed exactly right for the main character.  The movie so well lights the expansive aspect of these cheap motels, making them seem like other worlds when in the sight of just the kids, but we know that we would scorn these places if we saw them in real life.  It shows in those final moments how nasty poverty makes the world for Moonee, who will never get to run through the Magic Kingdom, and has to instead make do with calling a field of cows a "safari."  Admittedly I still would have liked perhaps a more succinct or less open-ended finale, but it makes sense within Baker's vision, and considering that the film in front of it is one of the year's best movies, perhaps people need to be less picky about ambiguity.

Those are my thoughts-I'm hoping you've all seen The Florida Project, but if you haven't it's a must-catch, and my first 5-star review of 2017.  Share your thoughts below, especially on the ending and whether or not you think the movie has any shot at the Oscars!