Nosh 88: 'The Florida Project,' 'Murder on the Orient Express'

By David Elliott

                                                  

Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, fresh each Friday.

Note: the next Nosh, no. 89, will arrive Dec. 1.

APPETIZER: Reviews of The Florida Project and Murder on the Orient Express

The Florida Project
April 30, 1969: a Disney press conference at the Ramada Inn off Highway 50 in Ocoee, Fla. – and I was there. But even as a very green “cub” reporter (for the Chicago Daily News), I was not very impressed by the scale model for the coming Walt Disney World, nor the flat speech given by nice, dull Roy O. Disney, Walt’s elder brother and junior partner. Roy built Walt’s final dream, not achieving the total Vision Thing but making the company billions (and making sleepy Orlando boom, if not bloom).

I never went back, yet a fine sequel has come: The Florida Project. Sean Baker’s movie, bursting with enough Floridean light and color to make the sun wear shades, was filmed in (don’t snicker) Kissimmee, 26 miles from Ocoee and 12 miles from Orlando. The film’s big motel, the Magic Castle, is supposedly very close to Disney World, and near Seven Dwarfs Lane, the huge-domed Orange World, the Twistee Treat and rotting, abandoned motels and condos. The Castle’s manager, Bobby (Willem Dafoe), has painted it candy purple and slaves to keep it civilized, despite cheap fixtures, bedbugs and many “guests” who are welfare tenants and remnants like Gloria (Sandy Kane), an old showgirl who sunbaths topless at the pool.

Dafoe buzzes with alert, fretful attention and almost saintly forbearance (his Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ was an excellent rehearsal). The film’s dramatic tripod rests on Bobby’s anxious concern about single mom Halley (Bria Vinaite) and her child Moonee. Halley, with a flashing smile and the vinegar sass of an amateurish whore, is both a playful chum-mom and a trash pile of immaturity. Her crude talk and breezy attitude are imitated by smart little Moonee. As Moonee, Brooklyn Prince is a funny, vulnerable, snarky but innocent update on Tatum O’Neal in Paper Moon. When she zips a zing like (at a buffet) “This is the life, better than a cruise,” a Tinkerbell rings: a little star is born.

Director, editor, writer Baker (with co-writer Chris Bergoch) also made 2015’s comedy Tangerine, about transsexual hookers in West Hollywood. Using that tripod of characters, Baker achieves a triple vision: the gaudy Florida of kitsch vulgarity, as seen by motel children living half-wild; a convulsed world of fearful, hard-luck adults, where a simple man like Bobby towers morally; and nearby Disney World, a fantasy of safe (and expensive) family fun. He combines the loose-jointed ensemble fluency of Robert Altman and the pop-eyed visual flair of Wes Anderson. In the closing 20 minutes all the strings converge, bringing one of the great finish shots in modern film. Like every director of hardy appetite, Baker captures a world by creating it. The parts can seem ragged, yet the living whole feels fiercely true. 

Murder on the Orient Express

It has been promoted like a last call for old thrills, mostly for the over-50s who might remember past versions, but Murder on the Orient Express overcame my resistance. The latest is a plush, credible entertainment, or as credible as the old Agatha Christie plot will allow. Deluxe suspects twist and tremble in a vortex of clues, though the only corpse is a gangster sharpie. It’s unlikely that the 1974 version with Albert Finney will ever be matched for pure star power on a posh train. But this new one is on the top side of a tradition that was dying when that picture was made: the star-spangled contraptions, crammed with major faces doing minor acting (in the desperate studio era of The VIPs, The Yellow Rolls Royce, The Longest Day, How the West Was Won, etc.).

Kenneth Branagh directed, smoothly polishing suspense rails as the Orient Express (Istanbul to Calais) rolls only to rural, 1930s Yugoslavia. The swank train is stranded by a wintry avalanche, leaving Belgian ultra-sleuth Hercule Poirot (Branagh) with a surfeit of suspects. To follow every deductive tangent would be silly, but tension mounts to a striking crisis of judgment, guilt, revenge and melodrama. Along with all the luxe (glossy woodwork, Deco glass, couture, champagne, Cole Porter), we get a   tricky overhaul of the Lindbergh kidnap tragedy (1932-36). Performances are deft: Johnny Depp, Derek Jacobi, Willem Dafoe, Josh Gad, Leslie Odom Jr., though stylish Judi Dench, Penélope Cruz, Daisy Ridley and Michelle Pfeiffer are a bit under-served (Pfeiffer, using her age well, has a good crescendo).

Swift, elegant, not too festooned with CGI display, this diversion  has the sophisticated flair of Branagh, surely the wittiest Poirot since Peter Ustinov in Death on the Nile (1978). The dapper affectations, the éclat of precise innuendo, the accent pitched well above Inspector Clouseau, make his commanding performance the binding element. If we must filch old gems from the past, Branagh is a fine jeweler. He doesn’t cut the stones as if they were only coals to feed the furnace of plot.

SALAD (A List)

Twelve Strong Movies Set in Florida:

The Yearling (Clarence Brown, 1946), Key Largo (John Huston, 1948), Distant Drums (Raoul Walsh, 1951), The Strange One (Jack Garfein, 1957), Wind Across the Everglades (Nicholas Ray, 1958), Cool Hand Luke (Stuart Rosenberg, 1967), Body Heat (Lawrence Kasdan,1981), Cross Creek (Martin Ritt, 1983), 92 in the Shade (Thomas McGuane, 1992), Ruby in Paradise (Victor Nuñez, 1993), Rosewood (John Singleton, 1997) and Ulee’s Gold (Victor Nuñez, 1997). 

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Orson was not fond of the Method, or intellectual acting, or even some classical effects of his old friend and early stage mentor Micheál Mac Liammoír, playing Iago (very well) in the 1952 Othello: “There was a moment near the end of a scene that has remained a standing joke between Micheál and myself for years. He had to pick up Othello’s cloak and go. And he picked it up, and looked very meaningful and all that sort of stuff, and finally I said to him, ‘Micheál, pick up the cloak and go!’ And that’s become a sort of basic thing I use when an actor wants to enrich his performance, I say, ‘Pick up the cloak and go!” (Welles to Peter Bogdanovich, This Is Orson Welles. The beautifully restored Othello recently came out as a Criterion double disc.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Katherine Hepburn’s subtle brilliance in the small restaurant scene in Alice Adams, with Fred MacMurray’s Arthur, “pressures Pauline Kael’s remark that Hepburn ‘has always been too individualistic, too singular for common emotions.’ Here she is giving fairly common emotions an uncommonly stylish clarity. Words arrive emotionally liquid, tempo ebbs and flows, candor teases open truth. It’s a lesson in ‘good breeding’ beyond the social game. She even chides Arthur’s dull, ‘laconic eloquence’ by warning about loose talk.” (From the Hepburn/Alice Adams chapter in my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available at Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

A great movie image is more than a still, it’s a distillation.

Cigar aloft, Orson Welles armors up to be Othello, as his Desdemona (Suzanne Cloutier) watches (Mercury/United Artists, 1952; director Orson Welles).

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