There’s a moment in “The Florida Project,” the Willem Dafoe-starring drama from Sean Baker about a six-year-old girl named Moonee (Brooklynn Prince) living in a motel with her mother Halley (Bria Vinaite), that I think about daily. Halley and one of her friends go out to eat one night and get food from a stand. We know that Halley doesn’t have a lot of money — we’ve watched her steal, scam, and engage in sex work to make ends meet — but she still puts a tip in the jar for the food stand worker. To those who have never grown up poor, it’s a moment that likely went unnoticed. But to those of us who have, it was a signal that this film came from someone who genuinely wanted to present an authentic look at how people living in poverty make joy in their lives without financial security. That includes always tipping service industry workers, because the folks who work those jobs are often in the same tax bracket, and we take care of our own.
Baker did not grow up poor in Kissimmee, Florida, but he and his frequent collaborator Chris Bergoch spent time with the real people impacted by the recession and systemic failures leading to the crisis of families living in motels in the Kissimmee-Orlando area, and let their stories guide the final script that would become “The Florida Project.” Baker’s filmography has a running theme: The main characters are often looked down upon in some way by “polite society.” He’s made audiences fall in love with undocumented immigrants, porn stars, the poor, the elderly, Black transgender sex workers, and drug dealers — all marginalized subcultures the world treats like scum and encourages others to shun.
His approach reminds me of the late Robert Vincent O’Neil, who, through films like “Angel” and “Vice Squad,” gave an empathetic spotlight to the alleged “underbelly” of Los Angeles without ever deifying or making moral judgments against his subjects. In Baker’s latest film, the Palme d’Or-winning “Anora,” Mikey Madison plays Anora/Ani, a stripper and sometimes escort who is nothing like the squeaky clean “Pretty Woman” archetypes of a “hooker with a heart of gold,” and Baker once again succeeds where so much of the industry fails.