Two movies that revolve around cheap motels, one very good and one....problematic, to say the least.
The Florida Project
Directed by Sean Baker, whose 2015 film Tangerine made waves on the indie circuit, The Florida Project is a small movie with a big and complicated heart. The film focuses on 6-year-old Moonee, a sassy scamp of a girl who lives in a motel with her mother, Halley, and spends her days causing mischief with her friends Jancey and Scooty. While the film is ostensibly about the innocence of childhood, Baker almost immediately pulls back the curtain to reveal how fucked up and precarious Moonee's world actually is. Her mom is little more than a child herself--probably in her early 20s, no job, incredibly bad attitude toward those who only try to help her. In short, she's a terrible mother. While not abusive, per se, Halley's choices impact Moonee's life in ways neither Moonee nor Halley fully comprehend. If The Florida Project isn't excellent marketing for birth control and the morning-after pill, I don't know what is.
The motel where they live is owned by Bobby, who is played with deep wells of compassion by Willem Dafoe, the biggest star of the movie. Technically, Halley and the other women (all with small children) who live there are not legally allowed to take up permanent residence, but Bobby makes exceptions for them all despite the fact that Halley yells at him and causes him all sorts of trouble. Bobby acts as a de facto father figure to Moonee, Scooty, and Jancey who spend their days running around unsupervised (the film takes place over the summer, so they're not in school). I don't even have kids, yet I was cringing to see these little ones running along busy streets and exploring abandoned houses filled with debris.
But Baker didn't make this movie to shit on Halley and the other residents living hand-to-mouth. He shows a side of poverty most people (especially people who go see artsy movies like The Florida Project) never get to see. Social conservatives will shit themselves from scene one, in which children have a bit of fun spitting on parked cars and calling the adult woman who chastises them a "bitch". Is there something that's the opposite of a wet dream? Because this movie is whatever that is to conservatives who are anti-welfare, anti-sex work, and anti-single mothers. It hits on nearly every stereotype of the poor that conservatives believe: that they're entitled, lazy, and immoral. BUT, by showing this hard knock life through the eyes of children, Baker humanizes both the children and the adults and shows how difficult it is to break the cycle of poverty. He also shows how even a "bad mother" can have her moments of deep love and caring: when Halley takes Moonee and Jancey to see fireworks for Jancey's birthday and presents her with a Little Debbie's cupcake with a candle stuck into it to serve as a birthday cake. Ill-equipped moms have hearts too.
The Florida Project's saving grace is its humor and its honesty. The movie is actually hilarious, mostly due to Moonee and her friends' antics. And when I say it's an honest, I mean that Baker doesn't pull any punches: he does not romanticize poverty nor does he portray poverty as a living hell. He doesn't put the poor on a pedestal. There are no noble Bob Cratchits in this movie.
At the end of the day, The Florida Project is just a slice of life...a kind of life that many, many people live filled with struggles, hustling, and trying to take your pleasure where you can find it. Baker honors that and asks us not to close our eyes and shut our ears to the stories of people who live a harder life than we live.
Grade: A-
***
Voyeur
Released on Netflix, Voyeur is a documentary about a man, one Gerald Foos, who bought a Colorado motel with the sole purpose of spying on people who stayed there. He created little vents in the ceiling of each of the rooms so that he could spy, unseen and unheard by the residents as they watched TV, argued, and had sex. Foos did this for years without ever being caught until he sold the motel.
This documentary shows Foos' relationship with iconic journalist Gay Talese, who wrote a story about Foos titled "The Voyeur's Motel" for The New Yorker in 2016 and recently released a book about the story of the man who peeped on people for years.
Supposedly, the twist is that Foos claims to have witnessed a murder in the motel--a murder that he inadvertently played a role in. He spied a drug dealer hide his stash in a vent in one of the rooms and then he--Foos--went in and took the drugs. Later, he watched through the vent in the ceiling as the dealer discovered the drugs were missing, blamed his girlfriend, and then strangled her. Foos didn't stop him or call the police. By all accounts, we should be able to add "accessory to murder" on top of Foos' peeping Tom charges...
Only Foos has never been charged or faced any consequences for his actions. To me, this is the real twist of the story and the one that makes me wonder if the filmmakers were ethically wrong to make this film and Netflix ethically wrong to release it.
While Voyeur certainly doesn't celebrate Foos, it doesn't really do enough to make it clear that what he did was SUPER WRONG. I mean, the guy built a literal "observation platform" to watch people fucking in his own goddamned motel! He supposedly claims he saw a murder (the documentary suggests that Foos made this story up) and didn't do anything to help. He betrayed the implicit trust in the patrons of his motel.
Yet Voyeur is honestly more interested in Gay Talese than anything else. While the film is about Foos, it spends a lot of time explaining who Talese is and his relationship with Foos that dates back to the 80s, when Foos wrote a letter to Talese explaining to him that he had bought a motel for the express purpose of voyeurism and that he kept a log of everything he observed. Then, Talese came out to visit Foos at the motel and Foos took Talese up the observation platform and they spied on a couple having sex. Yes, not only did Talese know Foos was actively committing something that, if not illegal, was highly unethical, he participated!!
You guys, I'm no saint. If I lived in a high-rise apartment building in a big city you better believe I'd have a pair of binoculars by the window. Voyeurism is fascinating and I think all of us have curiosity about what people do and say behind closed doors. But buying a motel and remodeling it so that you can spy on your customers every night for decades is wrong. The people being spied on did not consent to it--and that's exactly what Foos liked about it--that they couldn't see him, but he could see them. And Voyeur is not a clever enough, ethical enough, or ambitious enough film to both tell Foos' story and make it crystal clear that the man is a fucking criminal.
If I sound a little hesitant to fully condemn it, I guess I am because I don't know all the details about the legality of peeping (I think the fact that the statue of limitations was up allowed Foos to not be charged for crimes he committed years before). But Voyeur left a bad taste in my mouth and I really think it should not have been filmed or released--it's giving a man who took advantage of others a chance to speak for himself when all those people whose privacy he invaded don't have the opportunity to tell *their* story or get justice. I can't recommend the movie at all, and therefore I'm not going to give it a grade.
Grade: n/a
No comments:
Post a Comment