Review: In ‘The Florida Project,’ Enchantment in a Shabby Motel

Moonee is six. She lives in the shadow of Disney World, in a stretch of central Florida dominated by cheap thrills and off-brand amusements. 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.

But for Moonee (who is played by an uncannily poised and resourceful young actress named Brooklynn Prince), the Magic Castle and its surroundings are a land of endless enchantment and nonstop adventure. Mischievous and fearless — heroically bratty; devilishly cute — Moonee may remind you of Eloise, who tries the patience of the grown-ups at the Plaza Hotel in that immortal picture book. Their situations are different, of course. Moonee’s mother, Halley (Bria Vinaite), is not jetting around Europe leaving her daughter in the care of a stressed-out nanny. She’s very much a presence in Moonee’s life, perhaps more big-sisterly than maternal, but doing whatever she can to keep them housed, clothed, fed and entertained.

What “Eloise” shares with “The Florida Project,” Sean Baker’s risky and revelatory new film, is the ability to tell its young heroine’s story from two perspectives at once. Moonee’s free-range existence looks like a lot of fun, and she and her friends — mostly a boy named Scooty (Christopher Rivera) and sometimes a girl named Jancey (Valeria Cotto) — run wild with an exuberance that adult viewers can only envy. Moonee and Scooty are like Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer; the service road is their Mississippi River. They cook up pranks and follow their whims, heedless of the consequences.

But of course the viewer who experiences vicarious delight in their capers — ice cream tastes so much sweeter when you have conned some tourists into paying for it — is simultaneously conscious of an undertow of sorrow, anxiety and dread. We are well aware of the possible consequences, and also of the grim circumstances that grant Moonee her freedom. She is in every sense a child at risk. We watch her Little Rascal antics increasingly sure that something terrible is going to happen.

To balance joy and desperation as gracefully as Mr. Baker does — to interweave giddiness and heartbreak — is no easy feat. “The Florida Project” could easily have been cruel and exploitative, punishing its characters for their wildness and the audience for enjoying it. But the director, who wrote the script with Chris Bergoch, avoids the traps of condescension and prurience that ensnare too many well-meaning movies about poverty in America. Like Mr. Baker’s earlier features “Starlet” and “Tangerine,” this movie insists on meeting people on both sides of the screen where they are, on suspending judgment and extending compassion without abandoning its ethical grounding.