The Line Between Magic and Reality in "The Florida Project"
May 2022
Kelly Brennan
The Florida Project “accomplishes something almost miraculous — two things, actually. It casts a spell and tells the truth” (Scott, 2017). The film is a bleak reality of what poverty and struggle looks like for the working class on the outskirts of the “most magical place on earth.” Directed by Sean Baker and starring Brooklynn Prince, William Dafoe, and Bria Vinaite, The Florida Project uses editing, cinematography, and cinematic codes to portray this thin line between magic and harsh reality of poverty.
The audience can see from the very beginning of the film where the characters’ home is introduced to us what Baker is trying to convey to the audience. The motel that Moonee and Halley are living at is colored a deep royal purple. Normally this color of royal purple is a sign of wealth and riches but in this film it is a sign of poverty and hardship. Scott writes:
Home is a room in a motel called the Magic Castle, one of many garishly painted stucco-clad palaces whose names represent either false advertising, honest aspiration or brutal irony. This is an unmagical kingdom, a zone of tawdriness and transience, of strip clubs and strip malls, knockoff souvenir shops and soft-serve ice cream shacks. (Scott, 2017)
When the audience sees inside Moonee and Halley’s room, they are greeted by drawings on the walls of the hotel room, tapestries hanging, messiness everywhere, and a clearly struggling mom. The audience also might notice that all of the motels in the film are super colorful on the outside with colors like purple and turquoise but extraordinarily messy and dank on the inside; this shows the harsh reality Scott writes about earlier by casting a spell from the outside and telling the truth on the inside.
Baker uses plenty of wide angles and medium shots of the surrounding area with the kids’ voices over top because they are the driving force of this story. In addition, there are many wide angles and medium shots of the hotel itself with towels hanging everywhere, people outside smoking, clutter in the hallways/walkways, etc. It could be argued that Baker is trying to show that although it is a hotel, the people who are living there are treating it as their permanent home because for many of them, this is what they call home. Baker does this “by portraying both the realism of the working class, and the inherit need for escapism that comes with this” (McCausland, 2018). Meanwhile, the tourists who come to the hotel call it a “welfare slum hotel.” There is also a large focus through Baker’s lens on what people are wearing, their tattoos, and their piercings.
As we shift focus to the kids in the film, the audience will notice that their outfits are rarely matching, they re-wear a lot of the same clothes, and they share everything. They get their food out of the backdoor of a waffle house, share one soft serve ice cream, and take turns using the iPad (of course until it is sold for rent money). They beg tourists for money in dirty clothes and unwashed hair to get some ice cream from the shop that they trekked to. The children also “twerk,” a dance move that is often used in adult-only situations and the mothers encourage this behavior.
The kids go to a complex of abandoned homes where people have obviously been squatting and they imagine what it would be like to have a real home. They walk around and imagine where they would put their beds and belongings. The dialogue and bleakness of the rooms compared to the bright colors on the outside of the complex are important to note. The bleakness of the inside of the rooms that they are imagining living in reinforce the idea of their harsh reality while the colorful outsides of the buildings reinforce the idea of there being magic in these childrens’ lives. At the same point in the plot line though, the children are smashing windows and dropping things out of the second floor windows out of this “imaginary home.” After the complex lights on fire, Baker uses shaky handheld camera work to project their unstable lives.
Halley often talks to Moonee like she is an adult, disregarding how young she actually is. She talks to her and says, “Whatever Moonee, this room costs money.” When Halley and Moonee are taking “swimsuit selfies,” Moonee is trying to be sexy like her mom posing in positions inappropriate for a child. Halley also keeps marijuana in the room with Moonee and only gets rid of it because Child Protective Services is coming. The worst part of it all, and what ultimately leads to their downfall, is that Halley was selling her body and services of sex while Moonee was in the other room. It was not until the man walked in and said “Yo there’s a kid in here” until the audience really realized what was happening. Scott said it best when he wrote:
Halley and the other parents and grandparents trying to raise children in the motels are part of that history, chasing dreams that seem at once fanciful and mundane: celebrity, wealth, a steady job, a stable home. All of these things seem equally out of reach and tantalizingly close at hand, and the same consumer economy that creates such precariousness also provides a steady stream of pleasure and diversion. (2017)
The first time we see Moonee act like her age is when Halley is arguing with Child Protective Services. Moonee gets really quiet and for the first time we see her as a child saying “Why is my mom yelling?”
The end of the film is perhaps the most poignant part of what Baker is trying to portray. We see Moonee sobbing and holding her fingers in her mouth while she talks to Jancey about how she is being taken away and does not want to leave. This is the epitome of what a child should look like and be acting like, something that we have not seen throughout the rest of the film.
Moonee and Jancey begin to run away to Disney World, every child’s dream, where the real magic castle is. At this point in the film, we finally see the escapism Baker has been trying to portray since the beginning. The camera, music, and cinematography is so different at the ending because this is the first time they are going to the real Disney instead of the poverty stricken version we have seen throughout the film. “As Moonee runs to Disneyworld with her friend, she momentarily flees from the present tense to a temporary world in which she can be in control. The fact this moment is through a child’s lens, as emphasized by Baker’s change in camera as we shift down to Moonee’s height, only makes it more authentic” (McCausland, 2018). The girls are finally in a fictional world and escaping from their harsh reality.
Baker expertly balances between the line of magic and the harsh reality of poverty throughout The Florida Project. Accompanied by a stellar cast and crew, this film has the theme of hardship down pat. Overall, The Florida Project is an important movie in American independent cinema because of its ability to portray the children as adults for most of the film and show the new social realism of American film.
References
Baker, S. (2017). The Florida Project. United States; Cinereach.
McCausland, S. (2018, January 17). The New Social Realism of American Cinema [web log].
Scott, A. O. (2017, October 5). The Florida Project,’ Enchantment in a Shabby Motel. New York Times.
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