I highly recommend you watch the movie first before reading forward. It’s a great watch and a lot smarter and more poignant than any of the jumbled thoughts I’m trying my to put into words, and there are spoilers below.
I don’t think I’ve ever been this impacted my a movie. I’m from Florida, I grew up in areas pretty similar to what is seen in the film and around people that are pretty similar to the characters in the movie, needless to say, it felt almost personal how depressing this movie was. From the dilapidated aquamarine and pink condominiums to how just about everything is coated in Disney bullshit of some sort. It’s a highlight (lowlight?) reel of the worst elements to living in Florida.
The movie focuses on two main plots. First, the whimsical and mischievous lives of four (later three) children and their interactions with the crumbling environments and hobbled people around them, and second, the personal drama that arises when a bunch of damaged adults try to survive another day in spite of the poverty imposed on them by an economic system that is purposefully set up for them to fail. And yet for around half of the film’s run-time, the the lives of the kids is whimsically divorced from the soul crushing reality the adults are braving.
This respite is suddenly interrupted after Halley, the mother of one of the children is fired from her job at a strip club setting in place a chain of events that leads to her losing just about everything, including custody of her child.
And that’s just how the movie ends. It sets up Willem Dafoe as some sort of savior character and that doesn’t pan out. He ends up silently watching as Halley’s child-Monee, is taken by CPS and at a loss for words about what to say to the kid as she’s asks him what’s going on.
And just to pay off on the cruel fucking joke the movie sets up far earlier, after learning that she will be separated from her mother, Monee escapes one last time with her best friend to Disney’s Magic Kingdom, so that the movie could again contrast the crippling poverty our characters are destined to live in against the corporate behemoth peddling fake glittering bullshit all around them.
There isn’t a lesson learned, characters don’t even really develop. They just continually lose and eat shit until they hit reality’s version of a game over screen. Thanks for playing.
The one constant in the movie is how every possible institution failed our characters. Florida’s exorbitant rent costs doomed our protagonists into a life of destitution, lack of education ensures they continually make bad decisions and the event that started it all off was Halley’s SNAP benefits getting axed after getting fired for refusing to sleep with clients.
It’s not a fun movie. It’s not “entertaining” in the same sense most media tries to be. It’s a mirror being held up against the reality too many Floridians are experiencing and now more-so with COVID-19 ravaging the state.
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source https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/i0kf5d/the_florida_project_is_a_great_lens_into_the/
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