Three Films by Sean Baker: An Assessment
Originally published in Counter Arts on March 23, 2025.
The Italian neorealism movement rose from the ruins of WWII, and its characteristic pseudo-aimlessness was a powerful metaphor for life in the time of recovery. Without war recovery, the effect is mostly lost; the movement’s been dead for 70 years and a longshot for revival, especially in American cinema. The Florida Project (2017), from now-enshrined filmmaker Sean Baker (awarded Best Director and Best Original Screenplay for 2025’s Best Picture-winner Anora), somehow captures the spirit of the movement — as contemporary as the original with the shadow of consumerism standing in for war and the forgotten lower class for literal ruins — and that alone is significant (see also: Ramin Bahrani). But there’s something here that tastes sour, and to me it separates a good film from a masterpiece.
Baker’s two-year technical evolution from 2015’s iPhone-shot Tangerine to The Florida Project (in which some shots were also taken on an iPhone) is worthy of applause. Willem Dafoe, here playing a motel manager named Bobby, is a pleasure as always. Brooklynn Prince as the film’s child epicenter Moonee is truly revelatory, as much as I detest the word’s industry overuse referring to unknown actors. My friction with the film is simply Halley (Bria Vinaite, perfectly cast), Moonee’s mother, in the belligerent young drug-addicted single mom archetype. She’s commendably authentic, but is a miserable character to spend elongated time with; among memorable “junkie” moms (such as Amy Ryan’s terrific Helene in 2007’s underappreciated Gone Baby Gone), Halley severely lacks for charisma and isn’t “hidden” behind a brief collective screen time or a standout acting performance (Vinaite, a non-actor, debuted here), and consequently her attitude becomes unbearable by the third act (Bobby, a genuine everyman hero a few paces ahead of a reasonable adult’s patience and grace, justifiably forfeits his efforts to help her, redeeming viewers’ potential guilt for disliking her so much despite her sympathetic hardships).
At 90 minutes, with a plot streamlined to reduce Halley’s screen time and assign an overwhelming focus to Moonee (an approach akin to Víctor Erice’s 1973 The Spirit of the Beehive — one of my favorite films ever made — with its child protagonist Ana), it could be perfect; at 110, it’s a very good film with noticeable dips and lag, not one I’ll probably revisit.
Predating The Florida Project by thirteen years and Anora by twenty is 2004’s Take Out, about an undocumented Chinese immigrant named Ming Ding whose smugglers have given him a day to fully pay his debt. The reward from this film came after my viewing. Its bonafide vérité style — frantic handheld camera and digital zooms and extreme closeups — is a sensory strain and a bit nauseating, but captures the character of the setting (post-9/11 New York City) exceptionally well and acts as an external surrogate for the mostly-reserved protagonist’s anxiousness and urgency. And perhaps for no other reasons than cowriters-directors Baker and Shih-Ching Tsou (the latter herself a Taiwanese immigrant) shooting vérité and pointedly sketching out a narrative framework that lends itself to the following so powerfully, Take Out’s observations on immigrant workers and social class complexities are visceral and hard to forget.
The film was reportedly made for a few grand, which would have a monumental impact on a filmmaker’s creative options (deductively, Baker and Tsou didn’t have the resources to make the film in any other way or style), and of course Baker’s primary interest has consistently been working lower class and/or social outcasts struggling against capitalism or a simile of it, so I shouldn’t be surprised by its impact, especially given its startling likeness to Tangerine, for which my feelings are very different.
Since Tangerine, Baker’s last independent film, each of his releases has been made on a budget between $1 million and $6 million (Tangerine’s was $100,000), and his films’ average runtime has ballooned from approximately 90 minutes to 130. He’s maintained editing control on every work in his filmography. I’ve not yet seen 2021’s Red Rocket, but both The Florida Project and Anora, released before and after Red Rocket respectively, suffer greatly from bloat. Comparatively, a large part of Take Out’s effectiveness comes from its efficiency (85 minutes excluding credits), which not only serves the viewing experience but also emphatically escalates the film’s tension; even the frequent digressions from its central “plot” (Baker’s films are founded on and held up by themes and tone and are thin on plot, not unlike much of the work of Japanese master Yasujirō Ozu) retain tension because there’s a ticking clock on Ming Ding’s deadline and we know every second matters.
Anora, more than The Florida Project, mirrors the frenzy of Take Out, but its digressions end up smothering the plot and diffusing tension: there’s hardly a defined deadline (there are remnants, but — spoiler — Anya moving back to Russia doesn’t feel like something we should dread after he bails on Ani, even with consideration for her attachment to him), and the narrative machinations beyond Ani’s control (as with those beyond Moonee’s in The Florida Project) are crammed into the package as joint emotional investments when they’d add more value to the film as subsidiaries of our investment in Ani — narratively on the periphery; inferred, not force-fed.
Baker has a great knack for ending his films with an uppercut, and a memorable finale masks earlier weaknesses like a strong perfume. The Florida Project startlingly flips from neorealism to surrealism, finally embracing Moonee’s unadulterated perspective (recalling Erice’s aforementioned classic). Ani’s spirited New York persona crumbles under the force of her regret and anguish in Anora. And the final shot in Take Out, which wouldn’t be a narrative spoiler to describe but which should be experienced without foreknowledge, simultaneously encapsulates the sentiment of the film and viewing experience without a spoken word.