Young At Heart

“The Florida Project” and “Our Souls at Night.”

- Anthony Lane

Not since Derek Jarman gave us “Blue” (1993), which flooded the screen with a single hue for almost eighty minutes, has one color lorded it over a film with quite the impact that we find in “The Florida Project.” The color in question is mauve. The characters call it purple, but don’t picture some rich regal shade. This stuff is a blinder—a thump of eye-scalding violet that would have sent Matisse whimpering from the room. It’s a color that belongs, at best, on a stick of blueberry bubblegum, but it’s used by Bobby (Willem Dafoe), the manager of the Magic Castle motel, in Orlando, to coat his entire establishment—walls, doors, and even curbs. The paint job costs him twenty thousand dollars, and the result, one imagines, can be seen from space. Bobby’s a nice guy, and a model of patience, but, above all else, he’s a Mauvist.

You can’t blame him. Orlando is a Disney fiefdom, where a castle is nothing special, and so, if you spy a chance to make your place stand out, you grab it. The Magic Castle, near Seven Dwarfs Lane, is one of several prominent structures in the area: there’s also a stately pleasure dome called Orange World, a gift shop crowned with the head of a giant wizard, and the cone-shaped Twistee Treat. The last of these is a regular destination for Moonee (Brooklynn Prince), often with her friends Jancey (Valeria Cotto) and Scooty (Christopher Rivera). They have a craving for ice cream, no money to buy it, and a pocketful of scams with which to get it. “The doctor said we have asthma and we gotta eat ice cream right away,” Scooty says to a customer, who obligingly hands over cash. As for Moonee, her larks include starting a fire at an abandoned house and turning off the power at the motel. She is six years old.