Sean Baker’s bittersweet indie drama was one of 2017’s best movies, but how did it conclude? Here’s The Florida Project’s ending explained.
Here’s what happened during The Florida Project’s ending. Indie filmmaker Sean Baker has carved himself a niche in crafting slice-of-life dramas that tell the largely untold stories of people living on the fringes of modern American society. His 2004 film Take Out depicted a day-in-the-life of an illegal Chinese immigrant working at a New York City take-out, while Baker’s breakout 2015 movie Tangerine told the tale of a transgender sex worker living in Hollywood.
With his latest movie The Florida Project, Sean Baker turned his attention to an impoverished single mother named Halley (Bria Vinaite) and her six-year-old daughter Moonee (Brooklyn Prince, in an astonishing acting debut) who live in a cheap motel in Kissimmee, Florida. Although the cheerfully named Magic Castle motel they live in is located just a few short miles from Disney World, it might as well be a whole universe away as the pair try to eke out a living under the poverty line.
Alongside Bria Vinaite and Brooklynn Prince, The Florida Project cast features Willem Dafoe - in one of the best performances of the past decade - as tough-talking but kind motel manager Bobby and Valeria Cotto as Moonee’s newfound friend Jancey, who lives at the neighboring and equally rundown Futureland Inn. The focus, however, is on Brooklyn Prince’s Moonee whose childlike wonder, innocence and imagination elevate her above her bleak circumstances even as her mother resorts to increasingly desperate means like sex work to make ends meet. Moonee’s sense of wonder extends through The Florida Project’s bittersweet conclusion too.
The Florida Project’s ending sees Halley attract the attention of the Florida Department of Children and Families (DCF), who arrive at the Magic Castle motel with a couple of cops in tow to take Moonee into foster care. Moonee manages to escape the DCF workers and makes it to Jancey’s motel in tears and the pair run off together past the rundown motels and cheap outlet stores on Kissimmee’s tourist strip to Disney World. The final scene sees Moonee and Jancey running hand-in-hand down Main Street before arriving at Disney’s Cinderella Castle.
Although the movie’s climax has been hailed as one of the best movie endings of the past decade, it left audiences divided with questions raised over whether the final scenes are real or a figment of Moonee’s imagination. After all, it would take a pair of six-year-olds quite some time to get from Kissimmee to Disney World and slipping through the theme park’s security unnoticed would be nigh on impossible.
According to director Sean Baker, The Florida Project’s ending is deliberately left open to such interpretation. As Baker clarified in an interview with the Los Angeles Times, "Now we’re telling the audience that this might not be real, but perhaps [it’s] the audience’s moment to use Moonee’s sense of imagination and wonderment to make the best of what might not be a happy ending." So, whether audiences choose to believe The Florida Project ends with Moonee in the back of a cop car on her way to foster care or running down Disney World’s Main Street with her best friend is up to them.
