The Florida Project (Brooklynn Prince)

My husband thought the film ‘The Florida Project’ looked interesting, so put the blu-ray on his wishlist last year. He usually asks for thrillers or fast action films that he watches on his own, but he sometimes adds a couple that he thinks I will like too, and this was one of them. He was given it for Christmas last year, and we decided to watch it last night.

The film opens with some small children - with the slightly unusual names of Moonee (Brooklynn Prince), Scooty (Christopher River) and Dicky (Aiden Malik) - running wild, and behaving very badly to some new residents of the area. Moonee, we soon learn, lives in a run-down motel with her mother Halley (Bria Vinaite), who is a stripper. I found it hard to understand Halley’s accent, but the gist is clear. She loves her daughter, and occasionally they have fun together. But most of the time she neglects her in favour of smoking weed.

The children get in trouble with the new resident, but then Moonee makes friends with her daughter Jancey (Valeria Cotto). Halley has trouble paying her rent and tries various methods of earning money, none of them legal, and some of them shocking. The children are mostly full of mischief (at best), downright obnoxious at worst.

And there’s a hard-working, honest but often frustrated manager of the motel complex, called Bobby (Willem Dafoe). He tries to help people where he can, and be flexible when possible; but he has to do his job. And it’s a very difficult one at times. Bobby stands out as a person of integrity who genuinely cares about the folk he comes across, particularly the children.

There really isn’t much story. About half an hour into the film, we were both wondering where it was going. People were interacting, and day-to-day life was progressing, but there didn’t appear to be any plot. The locations were depressing, and none of the characters were at all likeable, other than, perhaps, Bobby.

However, we kept watching. The film flows well; the children are excellent and believable as actors, though it seemed surprising that Moonee is so bright, given the state of her mother. But their behaviour is terrible - they steal and beg, and cheat… and nobody seems to care.

The front of the blu-ray box claims that this film is ‘pure cinematic joy’, and that every moment is ‘glorious’. I think the reviewers must have seen a different film. There was no joy in it at all; on the contrary, it’s very depressing to think that people might live this way, and that children could grow up with so few morals. We didn’t see any glorious moments, either. Good acting, yes. A good pace, certainly. A few cute one-liners, mostly involving Moonee. But nothing remotely joyful or glorious.

There’s no actual nudity or explicit scenes, but a great deal is said or implied, including a couple of very unpleasant visitors to the complex. And there’s a lot more ‘strong’ language than I am comfortable with. The rating is 15, which I suppose is fair, but I can’t imagine most teenagers being at all interested in this.

As for the ending, it’s abrupt and so open-ended that we couldn’t believe, for a moment, that it had actually finished.

We wondered if the ‘extras’ would help us understand a bit better, but the ‘making of’ film was disjointed and uninteresting. We started watching the ‘interviews’ with cast, but it started with lots of commentary from the actress who played Halley- it was interesting to learn that she had never acted before this film, and did a crash course in acting beforehand, but there was no interviewer, and after five minutes of monologue, we gave up.

On the plus side, the film has given us an insight into an American State we knew almost nothing about, and a look at a lifestyle that’s entirely foreign to us. We’ll probably remember images from it for a while. But I can’t imagine wanting to see it again.

Review copyright 2020 Sue's DVD Reviews