‘Florida Man’: Washed up in the Sunshine State

Florida’s Flotsam and Jetsam

**Award-Winning Documentary**

Skippy Massey
Humboldt Sentinel

Florida is a state with a strange propensity.   It has the unique and peculiar property of attracting people who are at the end of their rope.

In Florida Man, a surprisingly poignant documentary by director Sean Dunne about the worn-out and inebriated layabouts in the Sunshine State, the viewer meets a wide variety of beercan philosophers in the course of 50 minutes. 

Many of them have tales to tell:  the government’s economic dependence on the incarcerated; the heady thrills of a lifetime of brawling; the murderous tendencies of pill addicts; the undeniable pleasures of an impromptu three-way underneath a beach pier.

It’s not exactly “Fight Club” as much as it is the “Old Drunk Guys’ Parking Lot.”  It’s a love letter of sorts about one of our weirdest and best states and some of the characters in it.

A majority of the footage was filmed outside various bars, motels, Laundromats and tattoo parlors, and certainly a majority of the interviewees, if not nearly all of them, have booze sloshing around their system. However, it’s hard to state anything equivocal beyond the two facts laid down in the title of Florida Man itself:  it’s in Florida, and it’s about males.

Not all of the guys are old, and not all of them are drunk.  Taken altogether, however, there’s an unmistakable commonality among these worn-out old loser dudes who are willing to interact with Dunne and his crew.  As one guy says, “When I moved here I was a damn Yankee.  I got upgraded to redneck.”

To his credit, Dunne had not much in the way of an agenda when he started the movie, letting serendipity dictate the content.  As he says, 
 

“Basically we just drove around aimlessly, stopping any time we saw something or someone that interested us.  One thing would lead to another and the universe would pull us in one direction or the other.

Most of what you’re seeing in the final film is the entirety of our interaction with these guys.  It was quick and to the point and I didn’t even interview people besides the occasional “Any words of wisdom?”

So what we got was a whole bunch of people telling stories and talking about whatever was on their mind.  It was a strange and exciting journey that took us to a lot of places we didn’t expect.”

Disney World it isn’t.  The succession of mostly unemployed, retired, or near-retired drifters is a resonantly sad depiction of Florida.

“Florida Man,” the Orlando Weekly said, is “about those guys you see pretty much everywhere in the state, riding his bicycle along unsafe highways, drinking beers in his front yard with his shirt off, tripping out in a hotel room with his bros.  It’s … well, it’s about as depressing as you could probably imagine it would be, because it seems to be just as aimless and sad as the guys featured in it.” 

A fellow whose footage opens the movie just lives to tussle.  “I love to make people bleed, I swear to God I do,” he says with punch-drunk conviction.

“Once you get to Florida, you don’t ever want to go back north,” is the questionable premise of another inebriated barfly, wearing a U.S. Navy trucker hat.

Moments after declaring, “I’m not a drunk,” an elderly African-American fellow jokes that the “Ace Liquor Store over there is my second home.”

The owner of the same store memorably says, “Here in the liquor store, we see probably 50% of the people arrive by either foot or by bicycle because they all have DUIs,” adding that most of his problem customers drink increasingly more until they “eventually pass away.”  He concludes rather matter-of-factly, “If you have a drinking problem, handle it.”

There’s much more to Florida Man, and it’s best experienced by watching this intriguingly fast-moving slice of the human condition firsthand.  If you have a few moments to spare, spend it with this hardy bunch of exercise and nutritionally-challenged leather-tanned sauced-up dipsomaniacal survivors– thanking your lucky stars that you, too, didn’t wash up as a piece of flotsam and jetsam tossed away on Florida’s shores.

~Via Sean Dunne, Dangerous Minds, Vimeo