If my wife wasn't happy with the parenting in The Florida Project, I told her definitely not to stick around for Mom and Dad.Both iTunes rentals were expiring within 48 hours on Saturday night, so I lined them up as a double feature. I'd already seen both, of course -- The Florida Project was my #8 movie of 2017, and Mom and Dad has thus far been occupying the top slot on my 2018 rankings (though Avengers: Infinity War is trying to muscle it out -- yes, I liked the 37th MCU movie that much. I'm still thinking about it).
Due to a weird quirk with iTunes, the 48-hour clock never started for Mom and Dad when I first watched it in early April, so I've had the entire 30-day rental period to potentially watch it again. And since it is currently so high on my 2018 chart, I figured I ought to give it another look to make sure I wasn't just smoking drugs the first time I saw it.
As for The Florida Project, I rented it as a 99-cent rental, but had been unusually lax about prioritizing my second viewing, and it almost expired without me even noticing.
I figured my wife was along for the ride on The Florida Project. She commented very early on how gorgeous it looked (in contrast to Sean Baker's iPhone-shot last feature, Tangerine, this was shot on film), and when I interrupted the film to point out that the characters were singing happy birthday -- something that wasn't legally possible in a film up until very recently -- she shushed me.
So you can imagine my surprise when she got up with about 15 minutes left to pause it and check the remaining time.
One of my initial complaints about The Florida Project -- the only one, I'm pretty sure -- was that it was possibly 15 minutes too long. This one would have done better around Tangerine's 88 minutes, rather than 110. But in terms of the content, I was loving everything.
Not so with my wife. She found it interminable not because there was one too many scenes that were essentially filler -- which I'd argue is key to this movie in some respects -- but because she hated the characters.
She HATED Halley, played by Brian Vinaite, but she didn't particularly like Moonee, played by Brooklynn Prince, either. For disliking the latter she blamed the former. She just could not get emotionally invested in a film in which a parent is so neglectful of her child, a big dickhead shaping a little dickhead in her image.
It made me think. It wasn't that Halley did bad things, as almost any character in any film is more interesting if they're capable of bad things, and if indulging in them is part of their fatal flaw. My wife is the first to acknowledge and endorse that truth. But the character needs to have a heart. Her problem was that Halley did not.
I don't indict Halley's behavior quite as much as she does -- I pointed to a couple moments in which Halley's parental instincts emerged from a general cluelessness and irresponsibility -- but it did make me wonder if we'd all given the movie a bit of a free pass on this count. Although I think of Baker as a consummately liberal type -- you don't make a sympathetic portrait of transgender prostitutes otherwise -- she was concerned that the portrayal of Halley might even entail some misogyny on the part of the filmmaker.
Having a character be completely unsympathetic is usually a problem for me too, though I guess that's not how I see Halley. Let there be no doubt that she's a bad parent. But she does try a number of different methods for making money, shady though they may be, before she resorts to turning tricks. Each time one of these efforts dead-ends, you can see on her face the defeat. That look of defeat is the frustration of a legitimate effort, at least from her perspective. Her legitimate effort might not be yours or mine, but in her world, this is what passes for trying. Of course, her fatal flaw is then that she doesn't value the money she does make, taking Moonee on a 99 cents store shopping spree instead of saving the money she made from the stolen Disney bracelets, but that spree is also a demonstration of any parent's need to feel like a provider to their child.
I'm not saying my wife should have seen the things I saw in Halley, but I do think that her view is more clouded by being a parent than mine is. I've been developing this notion that as people go along in life, they acquire personal life experience that clouds their objective perspective on the themes in movies. It could be things they're born with, or it could be the result of trauma or strong political beliefs that cause them to be triggered by certain things they see up on screen. Parenting is such an important duty for my wife that this may now be the thing that reduces her objectivity.
If it sounds like I'm criticizing that, I'm not. I think it's kind of beautiful, and it's definitely a good thing for our kids, who will benefit from her commitment to that duty. For me, I just try to leave these complicating factors on the sideline, because of my role as a critic. I can't be triggered by anything, because I need to recommend or dissuade someone from seeing a movie based on its core qualities, not my own baggage about them.
I guess I don't have as much to say about the second feature in the double feature, which my wife did not watch, as I started it at around 10:30. Mom and Dad is actually the 88 minutes that The Florida Project could have been, so the 10:30 start was very reasonable. And this being a satire, the bad parenting here is of course over the top, the result of some kind of telepathic signal being sent through TV screens making parents want to kill their own (and only their own) children.
I do think the film examines parenting in serious ways too, though, which is why it's not just an outrageous genre movie with no business at or near the top of my early 2018 rankings. While there is a high concept explanation for the murderous intent of these parents, the movie demonstrates the ways parents sometimes feel like they actually do want to kill their children, and why that happens. There are some interesting passages in here that dramatize the ways parents feel reduced to shells of their former selves by the drudgery of parenting, the type of thing that leads to their mid-life crises. The film takes really thoughtful pauses from its violent and zany overall tone to consider why a parent would build and then destroy a pool table, as a symbol of his own sense of being stuck in the mud, and then an exaggerated response to that feeling.
And then it gets funny again, and boy is it funny.
When I told her I was going to make Mom and Dad the second movie, my wife told me we probably would have been better off watching that than Florida Project. I volunteered to delay my second viewing of Mom and Dad until Sunday night, as that would still get it in prior to the expiration, but she said she couldn't watch movies in which parents are awful to their kids on two straight nights. Fair enough. I might have even suggested that instead if the driving force of the evening weren't to watch Florida Project once before it expired, but instead to watch Mom and Dad twice.
Besides, I thought she'd like The Florida Project more.
When it comes to images of shitty parenting on screen, even ones I consider thoughtful like this one, you never know what will trigger whom.
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