Film reviews round-up: The Florida Project, Only The Brave, Kaleidoscope, Marjorie Prime

A touching look at childhood, the bravery of first responders, awkward first dates, and a new view into the future

The Florida Project

★★★★★

Dir. Sean Baker, 111 mins, starring: Willem Dafoe, Brooklynn Prince, Valeria Cotto, Bria Vinaite, Christopher Rivera, Caleb Landry Jones

The Florida Project is one of the best films about childhood made anywhere in recent years. With its 15 certificate, it is also the utter antithesis to the typical Disney movie, even if it is set in a Florida motel very near to Walt Disney World. “Can it be a song of joy? And so many children poor?”

William Blake wrote of the poverty endured by kids in late 18th century England in Songs Of Innocence And Experience. The same glaring contrasts exist in the present-day America depicted here by Sean Baker.

The main protagonist here is a mischievous and imaginative six-year-old girl, Moonee (Brooklynn Prince), who’s living with her delinquent, tattoo-covered, single mother Halley (Bria Vinaite) in a very seedy motel run by the kindly but always exasperated Bobby (Willem Dafoe).

It’s high summer. School is out. Moonee doesn’t have anything to do but she is far too inventive to give in to boredom. Who needs Disney World when you can spend the day spitting on the neighbours’ cars or taunting elderly women who like to bathe topless by the pool or conning tourists into buying you ice cream or burning down homes abandoned after the sub-prime mortgage crisis?

Early on, the film is remarkably upbeat in spite of its characters’ straitened circumstances. Moonee is like a little modern-day Huck Finn, prowling round the purple walled motel with her friend Scooty and looking for adventure. Her mother Halley can barely scrape the rent together but has the same lust for life as her daughter.

They have burping contests together and sell perfume to wealthy golfers and their startled wives at a resort nearby. The film is structured as a series of vignettes. Baker often shoots from a very low angle, giving us Moonee’s point of view.

The performances are remarkable. It’s a commonplace observation that children are effective and so natural seeming on screen precisely because they don’t know how to “act”. Brooklyn Prince plays Moonee as a warrior, tough and self-reliant but with a charm about her too that can’t fail to enrapture even the most hostile adults.

The kids are at the heart of the film but newcomer Bria Vinaite is very impressive, too, as the volatile, foul-mouthed, self-destructive but courageous and strangely sympathetic young mother.

We know that the idyllic world the mother and daughter create for themselves can’t last. Bobby tries to protect them but Halley’s behaviour grows ever more erratic. As in his previous feature Tangerine, which he shot on a tiny budget on an iPhone 5, director Baker emphasises the brightest colours.

Characters may be living in squalor and poverty but all the buildings here seem to be pink or purple while the skies are cobalt blue. The sun shines most of the time. Moonee is so resilient and street smart that it’s easy to forget just how young and vulnerable she is.

The Florida Project unfolds as a series of self-contained episodes. Late on, the film risks becoming repetitive. Halley keeps on making the same mistakes. The bleakness of the final scenes doesn’t take away at all from the utterly magical moments earlier in the movie, when Moonee and the other kids create their own self-enclosed world in which the problems of their parents don’t affect them at all.

Only The Brave

★★★☆☆

Dir. Joseph Kosinski, 133 mins, starring: Josh Brolin, Jennifer Connelly, Jeff Bridges, Andie MacDowell, James Badge Dale, Miles Teller, Taylor Kitsch

One of the most important early American silent films was Edwin S Porter’s Life Of An American Fireman (1903). Now comes Only The Brave, another rousing story about the heroism of a group of firefighters.

They’re putting out wild fires in Arizona, not rescuing women and children from burning buildings, but their courage and selflessness is still exactly the same as it was in Porter’s era.

Only The Brave is based on a true story. You can’t help but admire the skill with which the screenwriters Ken Nolan and Eric Warren Singer have fashioned this rugged ensemble piece when they have such little fuel to work with.

The material here is essentially very grim. We know there are going to be fatalities. Either the firefighters will curb the next blaze or they won’t. That’s the drama in a nutshell. From this starting point, the filmmakers have made a film celebrating the best in blue collar American heroism while giving us insight into the lives of all the protagonists.

The structure here is akin to that of a sports drama. The team coach and its star performer is Eric “Supe” Marsh (Josh Brolin), a taciturn but inspirational figure. He is happily married to Amanda (Jennifer Connelly) but won’t commit to having kids. Wise but driven, he is determined to make sure his crew qualify as “hot shots,” which means they can be right in the front line when the next inferno arrives.

“Sooner or later, the fire is gonna come a knocking and when she does, this whole town is going to go up like a powder keg,” Eric predicts to his even more hardbitten boss, fire chief Duane Steinbrink (Jeff Bridges in drawling, scene-stealing, guitar-playing, country-singing mode).

The film is full of ironies that it doesn’t want to explore too closely. Success for Eric is for the crew to be certified so they can fight fires on the front line – but this will expose them to extreme danger. Most of the crew members are devoted family men.

Those who aren’t have girlfriends they lust over and plenty to live for – and yet their job involves putting themselves continually in death’s way. Eric is addicted to his job. He always refers to “she” when he talks about fire.

“Once you get a real hard taste of the bitch at work, there’s only one thing you’re going to be able to see and that’s fuel,” he says to his men as they look out over a beautiful, tree-filled but potentially lethal landscape. He spends more time with his crew than he does with Amanda.

Brendan “Donut” McDonough (Miles Teller) is a wayward youngster looking for redemption, a recovering drug addict with a criminal record whose former girlfriend is pregnant. Against the advice of his colleagues, Eric gives Brendan a chance to join the crew.

If he can go straight and earn money and respectability, Brendan may be allowed to see his baby daughter. He has made a lot of mistakes in his life, he tells us. Now, he wants to give his daughter what he never had, namely a caring father and a stable home life.

Only The Brave is superficially similar to recent Mark Wahlberg films like Deepwater Horizon, Patriots Day or Lone Survivor in which heroic oil workers, cops or soldiers sort out all America’s problems from the ground level up, doing the work that the politicians, Generals and captains of industry can’t manage.

This is a more folksy and old fashioned affair. One of its most refreshing aspects is that it celebrates a group, not individuals. There is the usual banter, high jinks and male bonding.

Between blazes, the men have heartfelt conversations with their womenfolk (none of whom appear to be allowed to work as fire fighters). Eric refers to something he once saw that shook him to the core – a bear on fire running out of the forest on the way to its own doom. He could be talking about himself.

Director Joseph Kosinski plays up the understated heroism of the firefighters. They don’t have super powers. A lot of their work – sawing down trees, destroying anything in the landscape that the fire could use as fuel – is very routine. We discover, though, that they will sacrifice everything for each other.

The most disconcerting scenes are when they’re celebrating putting out a blaze. We always know that any victory they win is only conditional. They will have to fight another fire soon that will be yet more destructive than the one they’ve just doused.

As Bridges tells them in a typically blunt way: “If you’re looking for sympathy, the only place you’re going to find it is in the dictionary, somewhere between shit and syphilis.”

The fires themselves are frighteningly realistic. It’s not just the huge flames but the heavily amplified sound of entire forests crackling like kindling. There’s a strain of extreme morbidity in the story which counters its sentimentality – a sense we get right from the outset that at least some of the firefighters are doomed.

Courage, machismo and technique with axes and hoses will never be enough on their own in the face of the apocalypse that will soon be coming their way. That’s why Only The Brave leaves such a strange and bitter aftertaste. Its real subject, it soon turns out, is death, not survival. On the evidence here, the life of an American fireman is altogether more lethal now than it ever was in Edwin S Porter’s day.

Kaleidoscope

★★★☆☆

Dir. Rupert Jones, 99 mins, starring: Toby Jones, Anne Reid, Sinead Matthews

Kaleidoscope is set on a contemporary London council estate but writer-director Rupert Jones’s debut feature has a flavour of 1960s bedsit land and of brooding, pause-filled Harold Pinter plays. It also makes obvious nods in the direction of Hitchcock’s Psycho and The Lodger.

The director’s brother, Toby Jones, stars as Carl, a middle-aged loner who has a painfully awkward first date with a woman (Sinead Matthews) he has met through a website. Abby is an extrovert – a hard-drinking, chain-smoking blonde, but she is unhappy too, caught in a marriage to an abusive husband.

There is a message on Carl’s answer phone from the person he least wants to see, namely his mother (Anne Reid), from whom he is long estranged. She turns up in the flat in seemingly conciliatory mood but the more she smothers him with affection, the more hostile he becomes.

He has a toy kaleidoscope he was given many years before that connects him to his childhood but that also reflects his distorted perspective on life.

Jones’s storytelling style is elliptical and enigmatic in the extreme. Slowly, the director lets slip such details as that Carl is not long out of prison and that he has a violent streak. He appears to have committed a violent murder and to have disposed of the body in a callous fashion.

We are never sure, though, what is real and what Carl is imagining. Mike Prestwood Smith’s harp-based music score adds to the jarring, dream-like feel of the film. In a very cleverly judged performance, Toby Jones makes his character seem vulnerable and sympathetic one moment and furtive and creepy the next.

The plot doesn’t always stack up but the two Joneses combine to create a psychological thriller with an extremely oppressive atmosphere.

Marjorie Prime

★★★★☆

Dir. Michael Almereyda, 97 mins, starring: Lois Smith, Jon Hamm, Geena Davis, Tim Robbins

Years ago, in the early 1990s, writer-director Michael Almereyda became famous in the independent film world for shooting films in “Pixelvision”, using a cheap children’s toy camera made by Fisher Price. Now, he is back with Marjorie Prime, a clever and affecting meditation on memory, bereavement, love and remorse masquerading as a sci-fi movie.

Adapted from Jordan Harrison’s Pulitzer Prize-nominated play, it’s a quiet and thoughtful affair, characterised by very soulful performances from everyone concerned, even those playing holograms. The film stands as a low-tech counterpart to Spike Jonze’s Her, albeit with older protagonists.

Lois Smith plays Marjorie, a woman in her eighties whose faculties are beginning to fail along with her appetite. Her daughter, Tess (Genna Davis), and son-in-law, Jon (Tim Robbins), live with her in a remote, seafront, very chic and minimalist home.

So does a computerised, much younger version of her deceased husband, Walter (played by Jon Hamm). This robot has extraordinary powers of empathy. The more information it/he is fed, the more he learns. To Tess’s chagrin, Marjorie gets on far better with the computer programme than she does with her own flesh-and-blood relatives.

Time frames are continually shifting. Marjorie has moments of lucidity and insight. There are flashbacks in which we see her as a younger woman, at the time Walter was first courting her.

Marjorie Prime is pitched somewhere between a traditional family melodrama and one of Samuel Beckett’s absurdist late dramas like Krapp’s Last Tape or Happy Days. In Lois Smith, who also played Marjorie Prime on stage, Almereyda has an actress to match Billie Whitelaw in the Beckett’s plays.

Smith captures the frailty and forgetfulness of her character but also her defiance and her curiosity about her own past which her robot companion helps her to pore over and reconstruct. Hamm plays Walter in deliberately stilted fashion as if he’s a cross between the ideal man and a tailor’s dummy. It’s a sly performance which both lets us know that he is a robot and hints that he has yearnings too.

Not all Almereyda’s creative decisions work. The sudden use of The Band’s plaintive ballad I Shall Be Released feels schmaltzy and manipulative, even if it is a beautiful song. In its own understated way, though, the film engages us both on an intellectual and an emotional level.