We Floridians know that's not remotely a fair description of our state, but even we still joke about Florida Man and Florida Woman whenever someone from our state, say, gets a DUI while riding a horse or chews someone's face off.
In contrast, director Sean Baker's film The Florida Project, which he cowrote with Chris Bergoch, puts Florida's crazy into sharp focus, thereby humanizing it and, in a way, helping us better understand why Florida Man and Florida Woman do what they do.
The film borrows its title from Walt Disney World's preliminary name, and it takes place in the shadows of the mega-attraction, where impoverished masses struggle to hang onto the seedy motel rooms that serve as roofs over their heads.
The focus here is Moonee, 6, played by Brooklynn Prince. Moonee lives with her young, unemployable mother in a purple, tenement-like motel called The Magic Castle. The camera follows Moonee and her friends — all of whom are in similarly precarious situations — as they run from scene to scene spitting on cars or scamming change from tourists at Twistee Treat so they can share a cone of soft-serve. It's mid-summer, and no one is keeping much of an eye on them, save for Bobby, the surly yet compassionate property manager at the hotel who watches over the otherwise unattended minors (played by Willem DaFoe, for whom there is already speculation of an Oscar nod for this role).
It's clear Moonee gets her indifference to authority from her mother, Halley (newcomer Bria Vinaite, whom Baker discovered on Instagram).
Tatted up, aqua-haired and prone to bad decisions and obscenity-laden outbursts, Halley very obviously had her daughter at a very young age, and struggles from week to week to keep up with the hotel's rate. It's unclear how she got here or whether she's ever had help from anyone. Over the course of the film, we see her go from making rent by dancing at a strip club to increasingly less savory ventures, and to some of them, her daughter gleefully tags along. She curses in front of Moonee and her friends and laughs out loud at the mayhem that unfolds nightly in the hotel's vicinity. So, too, do the kids.
Her antics can be hard to watch at times, but before you can dismiss her as Florida Woman in the flesh, Baker shows you a young woman who is tightly bonded to her daughter, someone who is doing everything she can to keep her kid from living on the streets. She tries to give Moonee and her new best friend Jancey (Valeria Cotto) as much joy as she can while shielding her from some of the uglier aspects of their reality.
If you're looking for rags-to-riches, you may want to move along; this is certainly not that. But it's no tragedy, either.
Instead the film's conclusion (shot stealthily with an iPhone inside Disney World's Magic Kingdom) leaves you wondering what comes next for those kids and their struggling kin. With it comes the sobering realization that thousands of people in Florida live like that. After all, Bergoch said he was inspired to write the screenplay while en route to his mother's home in Kissimmee, where he spotted kids playing whiffle ball in a motel parking lot, kids who were clearly not Disney-bound. Upon further research, he discovered that poor families with kids reside in cheap motels across the country.
Placing these underserved families walking distance from the happiest (and seemingly priciest) place on Earth is an easy way to show the sharp contrast between the haves and have-nots, but with enough color and character to not be heavy-handed or cast the poorest among us in a condescending light.
Perhaps it will also leave the viewer wondering why, as a society, we're leaving so many people behind and what we can do — as taxpayers, as voters in the State of Florida — to help make sure the Moonees of U.S. Highway 192, of 34th Street, of Nebraska Avenue don't become their mother.
This article appears in Nov 2-9, 2017.