The Quintessential Florida film: Sunshine State
When I first saw this film, I was not yet a film person but had likely just declared my major in geography: the study of humanity through looking at regional characteristics, definitions and groupings; the flow of people; the shaping of landscapes; and the flow of people.
One rule of geographic landscape reading is that no inhabited place is uninteresting. There’s something of value in studying the landscape of Allentown, Pennsylvania, even if you’re brain would be stimulated into overdrive trying to figure out how the hell Las Vegas ended up the way it did.
Still, Florida is more like a swampy Las Vegas with much richer news stories and even the non-geographically minded can get fascinated by it. It has spurned the Seth Meyers segment "Fake or Florida" and, in the age of the meme, the popular website Florida Man.
So where does it all begin?
Due to a combination of lack of valuable gems, inhospitable weather, and difficulty of developing on top of swampland (improbably turned into tourism), Florida was settled after the West.
However, air conditioning was invented and people like Henry Flagler provided the infrastructure, Florida paved the way for some of the early trends of vacationing, retirement, and winter snowbirds started appearing here.
Florida was heavily sold to tourists in the same manner of the first European to lay eyes on it: The Fountain of Youth. But every group that used Florida as its dream seemingly ran over the other: The Russian mob, the Quebecois, the Black population, New York snowbirds, and the Hispanic migrants.
National Geographic once described Miami as the modern-day Venice: Where art, wealth, and vice meet and sometimes produce spectacular results. One interesting factoid: When Joel Gurreau published the Nine Nations of North America in the 1980s, he divided North America into nine formal and functional regions, suggesting that state boundaries isn't really how things work. He suggested that South Florida was a unique Latin American bastion that wasn't really operated like America. At the time he wrote the book, Gareau noted nine deposed Latin American dictators were all living in South Florida. Indeed, a small group of Cuban ex-pats in South Florida wanting to save the cigar industry had enough lobbying power to persuade the US to get involved in the Bay of Pigs.
Florida has been mythologized a lot more through writing with the books of Dave Barry, Carl Hiassen, and Elmore Leonard who have ripped their stories from the headlines (the predecessor to Florida Man). Part of this is because Florida has the most lenient FOIA laws with regard to crimes, so crazy headlines are much more likely to make it to the front pages.
There are a lot of great examples of Florida films covering all those different views of Floridian life: Off the top of my head, there's the dysfunctional urban landscape of Miami in Barry Sonnenfeld's adaptation of the Dave Barry book "Big Trouble," the mob film "Scarface" (few know that Al Capone ran much of his Chicago mob operations from Florida), the portrait of Florida as an lavish 50's vacation spot for snowboards in "Some Like it Hot" and "Palm Beach Story," Miami as a happening singles scene in "Hitch," and the more backwater view of Florida as a small-town haven of eccentric characters in "Because of Winn Dixie."
"Sunshine State", mostly somber in tone, stands out to me as the quintessential Florida film, because it is the intersection of multiple Floridian versions in one Altmanesque whirlwind.
The underrated gem by John Sayles flew under the radar when it was released in 2002 (it grossed but it's worth a second look. Starring an ensemble that includes Mary Steenburgen, Edie Falco, Angela Bassett, Timothy Hutton, Alan King, James McDaniel, and Jane Alexander, the film centers around seaside town whose tranquil existence is threatened by an encroaching real estate developer.
Florida is largely a state where real estate development is the rule of the land. The city of Miami, for example, is no longer home to the Miami Dolphins, Miami Beach, University of Miami, Key Biscayne, or even Miami airport. As seen below, all those places broke off from the main city proper as the municipalities became dominated by gated communities and developments that encouraged voters to need the city less. Miami, in fact, survived a vote to dissolve the city entirely in 1997.
Steenburgen stars as a chamber of commerce head and overanxious real estate developer who is trying so hard to sell her latest development she doesn't even notice that her husband (King) is suicidal. In my years of local reporting, I have come across these Chamber of Commerce types and these jobs typically require very perky people who speak about wherever they live like it's shangri-la.
Bassett stars as former town pariah Desiree Perry who got pregnant by the local football star (McDaniel) before he made it big and is now returning to her hometown. She's deciding on behalf of her family whether to sell the land or preserve the special piece of her town. The theme here is Florida being a dream for so many conflicting groups of people is represented here.
For Bassett's character and her neighbors, the town represented the opportunity for blacks to have their little piece of the beach. The town also highlights the pockets of poverty found in many a Florida coastal town. or most traditional tourist traps.
Lastly, we have Edie Falco as Marley Temple who represents the state's evolving tourist industry. Temple, a sixth generation Floridian, used to be a mermaid in one of the seaside attractions that lined the highways before the corporate megaliths of Sea World and Disney World took over. What Temple is referencing, when she talks about her past life as a mermaid, is a real tourist attraction: The mermaids at Weeki Wachi Springs.
This is also a Florida thing, as the mermaid shows or the alligator shows that still populate the land today pose all sorts of questions as to how to promote nature, myth, and how not to step on past or future waves of progress in the tourist industry. Falco is now an owner of the family motel who's sick of where she's living. Her tryst with a landscape architect hired (Timothy Hutton) by the prospective land developer. It's a metaphor for the past Florida going the way of the future.
As a tapestry of intersecting lives, Sunshine State works as a great scene piece that has aged well and will likely continue to be relevant.
It has a running time of 2:20 but it's a film that moves at a great pace. It can be found on Tubi.
The event can be found here. If you need, I can get you a code to reduce the price:
Film Talk and Discussion: John Sayles and Sunshine State (2002) Tickets, Tue, Jul 16, 2024 at 9:00 PM | Eventbrite
