For Fans of The Florida Project

There is a French Poetic Realism tradition of filming marginal people as if they deserve the full weight of cinema's attention. Sean Baker belongs in that lineage. The Florida Project is shot with a wide-angle lens kept at the height of a six-year-old, and that choice is a political statement: it refuses to look down. The neon pastels and 35mm grain give the film a warmth that keeps it from being tragedy-tourism. The closest American antecedent is not a social-realist film but something like Robert Altman's naturalism in films like McCabe and Mrs. Miller, where an entire community accretes into a portrait.

The film's final sequence switches formats, from 35mm to iPhone footage, as Moonee runs toward the only fantasy refuge available to her. Baker made a deliberate craft decision: the rough digital texture marks the break into a register that is both more real (this is how children actually document their lives now) and more dreamlike. It is one of the few endings in recent cinema that earns its own ambiguity without cheating. Comparable formal ruptures include the ending of Capernaum and the penultimate sequence of Beasts of the Southern Wild.

Bobby is not a hero in any conventional sense. He yells at children, enforces rules he did not write, and cannot save anyone from the structural forces compressing their lives. What he can do is be present, consistently and without judgment, which turns out to be the rarest thing in the film. Dafoe plays him with complete physical ease, no performance visible. The role belongs in any conversation about great supporting performances alongside Gene Hackman in The Royal Tenenbaums or Mark Rylance in Bridge of Spies.