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The trailer and summary of this movie are absurdly misleading. They may make you think this is a beautiful movie about childhood and upbringing, just like Little Miss Sunshine, but it's definitely not like that.
Here, we have Halley, a terrible, irresponsible single mother who raises her 7-year-old daughter in the worst possible way in a motel in Florida. This woman says bad words in front of her daughter, feeds her with junk food all the time, doesn't teach anything useful or good. Besides, she prostitutes herself while her daughter takes a bath in the same room.
There are no redeeming qualities about Halley. The movie fails to raise empathy for her and for her obnoxious daughter, since it fails to accurately and efficiently develop its characters. I understand this movie tried to show child abuse from a different perspective, but it ended up being empty and shallow. All we see is hyperactive children being obnoxious to everybody and running errands , while their mothers and parents are absent and irresponsible. No background of any character whatsoever. No psychological profile. Only a mother who throws fits when things don't go her way and her daughter who behaves the same way.
When you're recording a movie about child abuse and negligence, you have to make sure you'll either make the audience feel some kind of empathy for the child or for the mother. In here, we don't have any. The movie focused too much action on WHAT the characters do, and not WHY the characters do it.
Willem Dafoe was basically wasted in this movie. Such a marvelous, talented actor should never be hired just to have a supporting role as a motel manager while the rest of the cast with their mediocre performances have much more screen time. I honestly don't see anything special about Brooklynn Price's performance. She behaved like a kid, nothing groundbreaking about that. And Bria Vinaite as Halley only threw fits and gave the middle finger to people - I won't judge too harshly her performance though, because the main flaw here is the screen script, not her performance - she had to work with what she was given.
Cinematography is fine, and so is photography. Beautiful color palette that makes us remind of the Disney World parks. But that just it. What could be a dark yet beautiful movie about child abuse and upbringing became an empty portrait of an irresponsible mother and her obnoxious child. We'll never care about them because the movie didn't care to give us some of their background. It's hard to make a beautiful movie when you don't properly develop your characters.
