Monthly Archives: November 2017

  • The Florida Project

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Sean Baker (2017)

    It’s a good title.  The ‘Florida project’ was the working name for what became the Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando, Florida – aka Disney World.  The setting of Sean Baker’s story is an extended-stay motel in nearby Kissimmee.  Even though this isn’t a publicly-funded development, its badly off residents introduce a hint of ‘housing project’ into the film’s title. The motel’s name – the Magic Castle – has a Disney ring to it.  One of the strongest elements of The Florida Project, which Baker wrote with Chris Bergoch, is the Magic Castle’s proximity to, and distance from, Disney’s Magic Kingdom.  As a birthday treat for the six-year-old heroine Moonee (Brooklynn Prince), she and her friend Jancey (Valeria Cotto) are taken by Moonee’s mother Halley (Bria Vinaite) to watch the Disney World fireworks – from outside the Magic Kingdom.  Its realms are geographically close but financially inaccessible.  The finale of The Florida Project (a two-stage nod to the climax of Les quatre cents coups) makes complete emotional sense.  Halley’s variously erratic behaviour leads the Florida Department of Children and Families (DCF) to separate Moonee from her mother and take the child into care.  At the last minute, Moonee breaks free from a DCF officer and dashes to Futureland, the neighbouring motel where Jancey lives with her family.  Jancey grabs Moonee’s hand and the pair keep running – all the way to, and into, Disney World.

    The visuals are also a strength of The Florida Project, as they were of Baker’s previous feature, Tangerine (2015).  He and his DoP Alexis Zabe don’t convey the so-near-and-yet-so-far relationship between Disney World and motel world simply by giving the latter a grim appearance.  Bobby (Willem Dafoe), the motel manager, gets the whole exterior of the place painted mauve – a shade surprisingly easy on the eye (it’s closer to the violet than the reddish-purple end of the mauve spectrum), even though you wouldn’t want to live close to it in reality.  The motel’s name isn’t merely ironic either – Moonee and her friends have plenty of low-budget fun and pleasure around the Magic Castle.  It’s a disenchanted place too, though.  A series of short scenes shows Moonee playing with her toys in the bath, and seemingly in a world of her own.  In the last of these scenes Sean Baker reveals exactly when the child’s bath time takes place.  It’s synchronised with Halley’s use of the adjoining bedroom to receive male visitors who help pay the rent.

    As I watched the film, I was struck by Baker’s non-judgmental description of his characters but I struggled to match him.   I was sorry Halley’s lack of funds forced her into desperate measures but two hours in her company is a long time, even from the safety of a cinema seat.  The Florida Project is full of lively incident but a little of kids behaving badly always goes a long way with me (and there’s plenty here).  On reflection, I’m not sure that Baker is as impartial as I first thought.  In presenting Halley as a loving but irresponsible mother, he tends to imply that both qualities are positive:  that Moonee can run wild – be more of a true child, the film seems to say – thanks to Halley’s fecklessness.  Perhaps Baker doesn’t mean to make this connection.  There are other struggling-to-make-ends-meet, caring but less undisciplined mothers in evidence – Ashley (Mela Murder), whom Halley falls out with and physically assaults, Jancey’s mother (Sonya McCarter).  Compared with Halley, however, these two women are at the margins of the story.  It’s striking too that Baker doesn’t follow up the shocking moment when one of Halley’s clients needs to use the bathroom and, on opening its door, is upset to discover Moonee inside.  Elsewhere, Moonee is lively and inquiring but she never asks her mother who the strange man was.

    Sean Baker gets remarkable performances from the children in the cast, especially Brooklynn Prince.  Moonee is anything but a crybaby so it’s affecting when she finally bursts into tears, as she makes her desperate escape to Jancey’s motel.  Except for Willem Dafoe, the adult actors with larger roles are virtual unknowns – or were unknown to me, at any rate.  (Caleb Landry Jones makes a very brief appearance as Bobby’s son Jack and Macon Blair has a cameo as a tourist.)   Dafoe’s presence in the cast creates something of an imbalance.  His acting is the opposite of scenery chewing but his familiarity means you’re aware of it as acting even so.  In comparison, the other grown-ups are less like actors than like actual people whose behaviour the camera is recording.  Dafoe interacts well with everyone he shares the screen with, including, in one amusing little scene, three cranes (birds rather than machinery).  There’s a less delightful but nonetheless compelling exchange with a creepy elderly man (Carl Bradfield) hanging round the motel – a paedophile on the prowl, Bobby reckons.  We learn that his marriage to Jack’s mother has broken up but Bobby, in conversation, doesn’t give a lot away.   The regret etched in his face and the doggedness of his bearing, however, say more than is in the script.   Willem Dafoe, in other words, conjures up a sense of Bobby’s past life and makes him magnetic in a way that no one else on screen is.  Thanks to his acting skills, the increasingly exasperated but unfailingly conscientious Bobby becomes the heart of The Florida Project though I’m not sure this is what Sean Baker intended.

    10 November 2017

  • Breathe

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Andy Serkis (2017)

    Breathe purports to tell the true story of the life shared by Robin and Diana Cavendish.   In 1958, a year after their marriage, Robin was diagnosed with poliomyelitis and doctors gave him only three months to live.  He and his marriage to Diana survived for another thirty-six years.  Although paralysed from the neck downwards and able to breathe only through the help of a mechanical ventilator, Cavendish became an unflagging advocate for the physically disabled and played a significant role in the development of disability aids, especially for British responauts.  Andy Serkis had a deserved success playing the polio sufferer Ian Dury in Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll (2010) but Breathe, the first film that he’s directed, is weak.  The episodic narrative has no momentum.  The pace is unvarying.  Breathe is a motion picture going through the motions and I spent most of its two hours assuming that the underlying problem was Serkis’s inexperience behind the camera.  No doubt this does play a part but another possible explanation emerges at the very end.  Text on the screen summarises the afterlife of Diana Cavendish and of her and Robin’s only child, a son born just weeks after the onset of Robin’s polio.  Diana is still going strong today.  The news that Jonathan Cavendish grew up to be a film producer comes initially as a relief.  The film has portrayed Jonathan, even in his early twenties, as such a trembling wimp (Dean-Charles Chapman) that you’ve wondered fearfully what became of him.  But then we learn that Jonathan conceived and produced Breathe as ‘a ‘tribute to his parents’.  That may be a noble enterprise but it doesn’t guarantee a decent drama.  (Robin Cavendish’s life might have made for a stronger documentary).  Is it the producer’s strong personal engagement in the project that’s resulted in direction of such respectful, cautious dullness?

    The upper-middle-class scene-setting and the protagonists’ courtship at the start are perfunctory.    Period sports car, Robin (Andrew Garfield) at the wheel, whizzes down country lane en route to cricket match.  Robin hits a six, in the process smashing china teacups set out by the pavilion and spotting Diana (Claire Foy) among the spectators.  He’s warned that this English rose is a ‘heartbreaker’ but it’s love at first sight – they’re soon married and out in Keen-ya, where Robin works as a tea broker.  Breathe is marking time until illness strikes him down – what’s startling is that it gives the same impression once he’s contracted polio and the Cavendishes return to Britain.  In spite of the flatness of William Nicholson’s script, there were things I didn’t follow.  How does Robin’s grim initial prognosis improve?   If the answer is through his exceptional strength of will, there’s not much evidence of this – not, at least, until his friend, the scientist and inventor Teddy Hall (Hugh Bonneville), develops a wheelchair with a built-in respirator that means Robin isn’t permanently bedridden.  Diana is oppressed by the family’s parlous financial situation but only for a moment:  their lifestyle looks materially comfortable – enough, at least, for them to host, over the years, a succession of parties in the grounds of their home.  There’s a single mention of Robin’s successfully playing the stock market – is this how he and Diana continue to manage?   She has identical twin brothers (Tom Hollander), who share some early scenes together.  I can’t explain quite how but these seem artificial (compared with, say, the corresponding scenes in Legend).  Is this why, after a while, Andy Serkis features either one twin or the other (or perhaps the same one continuously) until a brief dual reappearance near the end?

    As Robin Cavendish embarks on his campaign to improve the lot of other disabled people, the film’s shallowness becomes seriously problematic.  It’s only to be expected that the medical establishment is instantly dismissed as unsympathetic and bureaucratic but the racial stereotyping is harder to swallow:  Germans are ice-hearted technocrats whereas Spaniards (as the Cavendishes’ holiday in their country reveals) are warm and life-loving.  Once Robin has delivered a rousing speech at an international disability conference, his campaigning work, as far as the film is concerned, is done.  Andy Serkis surprisingly decides to underlines the sketchiness of the story he’s telling by putting year dates up on the screen.  The speech in Germany is given in 1973; the narrative then jumps forward to 1981 and the events leading up to the euthanasia that Robin persuades his doctor and friend (bland Stephen Mangan) to administer.   It’s rather astonishing to learn that Robin Cavendish actually died in 1994.  Thirteen years have been docked from a life whose length defied expectations because they were, it seems, a narrative inconvenience in this ‘tribute’.

    Breathe naturally invites comparison with The Theory of Everything (2014) and the new film comes off badly.   Andy Serkis and William Nicholson do little to explore Robin’s feelings of remorse that his disability has imprisoned Diana as well as him.   (This comes up in only two exchanges between them, one of which is humorous.)  Robin is suicidally depressed in the first stages of his paralysis but, as he tells the disability conference in Germany, ‘I decided to live – my wife told me to’.  It really does seem to be as simple as that.  Although the character of Robin is much more broadly written than that of Stephen Hawking, Andrew Garfield’s charm and skill allow him to go some way to emulating Eddie Redmayne’s achievement in the able-bodied part of The Theory of Everything – creating a personality strong enough to give the viewer a continuing sense of what illness has taken away.   Garfield is much reduced in a role that doesn’t exploit his native eccentricity.  He doesn’t express much while silent as well as immobile but he finds a kind of eccentricity in Robin’s extreme poshness, which helps once he regains his voice.  Diana Cavendish’s selfless devotion to her husband, punctuated by occasional moments of anguish and exasperation, doesn’t give Claire Foy much to work with (Diana has nothing like the semi-independent life that Felicity Jones’s Jane Hawking built for herself).  However, Foy has perhaps the strongest moment in the film.  Her face is transformed as Diana takes in what a doctor tells her about Robin’s illness and she realises that her life isn’t going to be the mostly pleasurable and comfortable one she’d expected.  This facial transformation may not be realistic but it is dramatically powerful – and, as such, virtually unique in Breathe.   The protagonists are evidently courageous and admirable yet their son’s loving commemoration of them, sad to say, sells Robin and Diana Cavendish short.

    7 November 2017

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