Two weeks ago, I signed off at the end of my SXSW 2025 post-mortem by looking ahead to the upcoming Dallas International Film Festival. Please allow me to now pull a Tarantino and go back to the week before SXSW started. In the crush of activity over the four days between what I’m about to describe and the first day of South By – it was a flurry of laundry, the day job (because I’m only given so much PTO in a given year!), and preparing for my trip down to Austin – I barely had time to recover from another film festival (let alone getting anything written about it) before I was out the door again.
But I need to go back even further.
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Child Grooming is a fitting alternate title for Red Rocket. In at least one interview piece focused on Sean Baker’s new film, the director is described as “playing with fire” when it comes to the subject matter of the movie. In 2017, Baker directed my number one film of the year, The Florida Project. I praised that movie for practicing radical empathy. In my description of The Florida Project for my top ten list of that year, I stressed that “we have a duty to look after each other. And yes, even when we don't agree with someone's life choices. Yes, even when we think they don't deserve it. No one deserves to live on the fringes of our society because they don't have enough of the only thing we seem to care about: money.”
Baker and his frequent writing partner, Chris Bergoch, test the limits of the radical empathy I singled out in my praise for The Florida Project. It’s like Baker wanted to know if I, personally, would grant the same empathy to an abuser, someone who will use anyone to get what he wants. Baker does it for laughs in a movie that focuses on a 40-something-year-old man harnessing every ounce of his charm to convince a 17-year-old girl to run away with him so they can make a fortune together in porn.
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Sean Baker’s new film, The Florida Project, is a video essay on empathy. It’s a moving, funny, and heartbreaking depiction of the poverty many Americans struggle with while living in the richest country on earth. It shows the resilience of children to make the best of any situation. It also feels incredibly authentic.
The movie shows us one summer in the lives of guests at The Magic Castle extended-stay hotel. In particular, we see the world through the eyes of Moonee, a precocious 6-year-old girl, and her friends. Moonee and her unemployed mom, Halley, are unfailingly referred to as guests by hotel management because calling them what they really are, residents, would give them legal rights the hotel’s owners can’t afford, and the Florida government won’t allow.
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