The Florida Project

When my wife mentioned The Florida Project (2017) a few weeks ago I thought it sounded interesting, enough to get me out of the house on a weekday evening. Something about a single mom and her unsupervised child living in a hotel in Florida down the street from Disney World. We watched it at the Music Hall in lovely downtown Portsmouth.

*Spoiler Alert!*

The movie is gritty, shot in 35mm, and watching it you almost feel the endless concrete and humidity, and the constant din of traffic raises the tension level noticeably. It's dirty and the people are trashy, and the world is an endless line in every direction of crappy hotels, fast food restaurants and concrete. It's soul destroying. Within five minutes my wife leaned over and whispered in my ear, "F*** Florida." I concurred. (Everyone relax. I'm sure there are lovely places in Florida.)

We meet Halley (Bria Vinaite) and her child, cute little Moonee, as they navigate summer break with Mom having lost her job as a stripper. Mom is a foul mouthed pot smoking Woo Girl, dumb as dirt and utterly without scruples. She lives on the taxpayers' tit, paying rent by the week in a giant cheap hotel surrounded by other people doing the same thing. Entertainment is watching a gang fight in the parking lot on a Saturday night. Moonee, played too well by Brooklynn Prince, is a complete brat, six years old and so awful I briefly reconsidered my position on child abuse.

No way this story was going anywhere good. Moonee roams free with her friends Dicky (Aiden Malik), Jancey (Valleria Cotto), and Scooty (Christopher Rivera), begging tourists for ice cream money and shouting profanities at people and engaging in delinquency. The only thing approaching a positive male role model in their lives is Bobby, the hotel manager, played by Willem Dafoe. Bobby's a good guy. He chases away pedophiles and tries to keep the drug dealers out too, and seems to feel sorry for Halley, though we never really learn why (and she never appreciates it).

The kids leave the hotel property everyday, mostly following Moonee, and travel far up and down a major thoroughfare, in search of food stolen from a local diner where Scooty's mom works, or exploring their surroundings. One day they venture into an abandoned building and set it on fire. Worried about the consequences, Scooty's mom Ashley (Mela Murder) forbids him from playing with Moonee, and stops stealing food for her and Halley. Halley retaliates by finding ways to torment Ashley.

Then we learn that Halley has found a new way to earn money. Let's just say it's "off the books," and she's not reporting it to the unemployment office. An ad online directs paying customers to her room at the hotel, where she – let's just say she "entertains" them while Moonee takes a bath with the door closed and music turned up really loud. When she finds herself shy on the rent one week she wanders down to Ashley's room and asks for a loan. Ashley expresses surprise that Halley is short on money given her new profession. Halley responds by beating Ashley unconscious.

Before long the Child Protective Services (CPS) show up at Halley's door, asking about her assault on Ashley and her online ad. She refuses to let them in, and when Moonee arrives on the scene – after having been out wandering the streets unsupervised yet again – Halley is outraged that CPS would do this "in front of" her kid. Halley has such high parenting standards after all.

It's only a matter of time before they come to take Moonee from her, and the film closes with the child running away to Disney World with Jancey. We can only imagine that she is eventually found and placed in foster care while an investigation into her mother's fitness as a parent is conducted. Nothing less than Halley's complete poverty of character had me cheering for CPS.

In an interview about the film Bria Vinaite said, "I just hope that people walk away [from the movie] realizing that this is a serious thing, that it's happening in a lot of different communities, it's not just in Orlando." She makes a fair point. We spend a lot of time talking about poor people in the US but little more than that. Left out of any discussion of this film, or the many "marginalized communities" that it portrays, is the different kinds of poor people we can find there. Not all poor people are equal.

Ashley is a single parent working at a crappy job who wants to be responsible for Scooty. Jancey is being raised by her grandmother, who also has some standards. Bobby does what he can to look after other people's kids, and even stoops to the indignity of paying his own son to do odd jobs around the hotel just so they can spend some time together. We don't know anything about Dicky's family because they leave for New Orleans partway through the film (with Dicky, of course).

But all stand in stark contrast to Halley, who thinks nothing of lying and cheating, prostituting herself in front of her child, using her friends, and demanding service and consideration from people she will happily insult (or physically attack) in the next breath. Her idea of non-violent conflict resolution is slapping a used Maxipad on a glass door – also in front of her daughter. She's like watching Kathleen Hanna in concert, or today's college students. Except Halley doesn't pretend to be smart.

Generations are trapped in poverty. Leftists want to throw more money at them, but that won't help Halley. She's just pure trash. Perhaps the first step in helping the poor is realizing that not all of them deserve it. Once that's firmly established maybe we can start doing something meaningful for those that do.