Tideland

When the dysfunctional Queen Gunhilda (Jennifer Tilly) dies of overdose, her daughter Jeliza-Rose (Jodelle Ferland) travels with her addicted father Noah (Jeff Bridges) to the old and abandoned house of Noah's mother in the country. While her father takes "a vacation" injecting drugs, Jeliza-Rose lives a world of fantasy with her heads of doll Sateen Lips, Glitter Gal, Mustique and Baby Blonde. Noah dies in his trip, and Jeliza-Rose meets the insane Dell (Janet McTeer) and her retarded brother Dickens (Brendan Fletcher), spending most of the time together.

I do not know whether Terry Gilliam was in an acid trip when he wrote the dark, bizarre and insane "Tideland", but it is one of the craziest movies I have ever seen. However, I liked the originality of the story. I could never guess the insanity of the next scene of this unpredictable film. I was also very impressed with the maturity and performance of Jodelle Ferland in her difficult lead work. This little girl is the story, and it is amazing and impressive, for example, the sequences with Jeliza-Rose preparing the dope of her father. The nightmarish atmosphere and the music score complete this original and unique journey to the irrational world of Terry Gilliam. My vote is seven.

Title (Brazil): "Contraponto" ("Counterpoint")

Having watched Terry Gilliam's Tideland just a few hours ago, I sat down to write a review and find that I can't. I'm still too angry.

Not at Gilliam, no. I am angry because I half-dreaded turning on the movie to begin with. Critics largely reviled Tideland on its (minimal) American release -- Rotten Tomatoes calculates its positive receptions at 27%. And a fair number of online commentators, even fans of the director, have branded the movie as "awful," "a mess," "disappointing," etc., etc. So, while I felt interest in Tideland, I put off watching it. The reviews made me wary and I hated to see Gilliam flop. But today it came from Netflix and I thought, why not, and popped it in.

And now I am angry -- angry because I cannot believe this beautiful, scary, funny, mesmerizing, heart-wrenching movie is the same one discussed in all those reviews. Have I stumbled on some unique director's cut that no one else got to see? Or have I misunderstood the purpose of movies?

At the beginning of the movie Gilliam himself appears, in black-and-white, like Edward Van Sloan at the beginning of Frankenstein, to inform us that we may find the movie shocking, but that it should be seen as through the eyes of a child -- innocent. One can take this prologue either as a bold stroke or a move of desperation, but either way, he's right. Little Jeliza Rose (played by an astounding Jodelle Ferland) goes through absolute hell, set adrift in a bare landscape by a heroin-addicted father (Jeff Bridges). Having no protection, no support, no food, and nothing to do, she builds a new reality out of, simply, play.

The redemption of imagination is Gilliam's Great Theme, and has featured in all his movies, but never I think with the depth of feeling displayed here. The camera glides and bobs and darts, low to the ground, a child's eye view, and the tone of the movie stays true throughout, without a whiff of sentimentality. Jeliza's situation is bleak and terrifying, but she's occupied with other and more pressing issues -- conversing with squirrels, squabbling with her dolls, and befriending her alarming neighbors: a witchlike taxidermist and her mentally retarded brother.

But she's no fool, and Gilliam isn't either. The dreadful reality is always present, and Jeliza knows what's what; she possesses that paradoxical childhood perspective that allows a doll's head to be "just a doll's head" and at the same time a living person with an identity. The movie shows us the world as her imagination transforms it; she spins terror and tragedy into fable.

This movie staggered me; it's a genuine work of art, and it left me in tears. If that puts me at odds with 75% of the critical consensus, I'll live with that. When I think of the endless trite garbage that these same critics routinely praise, garbage that often wins awards or breaks box-office records, comfortable and self-congratulating hackwork that rarely has a scrap of the kind of creative courage or honesty of something like Tideland, it frankly makes me question what a good movie actually IS. Do feel-good escapism and drearily unnatural "naturalism" really comprise the height of cinematic expression? And does the idea of being made genuinely uncomfortable by art, genuinely challenged -- surely art's primary function -- have any current market value?

In short, if Tideland is not a good movie, then what are movies for?

Bizarre. Fantasmagorical. Frightening. A story-book nightmare.

Who else but Gilliam would give us a view of the inside of "The Dude's" ribcage?(Well, maybe Lynch)

In Tideland we approach to the edge of what is acceptable to the average film-goer but I kept wishing we would go over the edge and see what's there. Others in the audience claimed they wanted to escape to the lobby. It leaves most viewers uneasy, as if the film is an unpleasant taste to be rinsed from the mouth.

Whether or not you like it relies on the individual but what cannot be denied is that the film floats on the performance of Jodelle Ferland who plays 8 year old Jeliza-Rose as a modern day Alice though Tideland seems a far more frightening place than Wonderland. With the aid of her finger-puppet dolls' heads Ferland essentially inhabits 5 different roles withing the film. Easily one of the creepiest but most interesting performance by a child in years.

Good film? Bad? This hard-to-digest film seems to remain outside of such judgments. Best to see it for yourself. One thing is guaranteed: it's an unsettling journey into the realms of the weird.

I don't know what to think of it. Beautiful? Yes, Creative? Of course. Disturbing? You bet. Funny? Hysterically. What could be funnier that Jeff Bridgess playing aged Dude - dad to the extreme, part II - "Duddy takes vacation to the point of no return"? Or Jennifer Tilly as a caricature of Courtney Love? Unpleasant? Very much so. Original? The director himself called his movie, "Alice in Wonderland meets Psycho" and these are just two references of many. You can name all novels, short stories or the movies about the little girls escaping their dreadful realities in the world of their imagination as well as "Wizard of Oz", Tennessee Williams' plays, Roman Polanski's "Repulsion" and one of the most stunning screen adaptations of "Alice in Wonderland", Jan Svankmajer's "Alice". Gilliam in "Tideland" borrows from them or rather meditates on the same themes, using his unique tools, and bringing his unique vision and talent in the familiar harrowing story of a child lost.

The movie is technically superb and visually arresting - it must be. If anything, Terry Gilliam is known as one of the most talented and wildly imaginative modern filmmakers, the true eccentric. He describes himself better than anyone ever would:

"There's a side of me that always fell for manic things, frenzied, cartoony performances. I always liked sideshows, freakshows. ...Absolutely grotesque, awful, tasteless. I like things to be tasteless."

I guess, whether you'd like "Tideland" or not, would depend a lot on your sharing his fondness for the things "absolutely grotesque, awful, tasteless" - there are plenty of them in "Tideland" yet strangely it is tender and sad, and in its best moments undeniably brilliant. Often called modern fairy tale for adults, the movie fits perfectly the description. Fairy tales, the unabridged versions of them are often scary, graphic, disturbing, violent, bloody, gory...and fascinating. Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Anderson - his "Little Mermaid" is one of the saddest, even tragic tales ever written. Oscar Wilde's fairy tales, "Arabian Nights" - the real thing, not the adaptations for the children; myths and legends of ancient Greece - the myth of two brothers, Atreus and Thyestes, the story of Oedipus - that's pure horror and tragedy. Well, back to the Gilliam's fairy tale. Did I like it? I don't know. What I do know that the very last shot of the movie, the one which supposed to symbolize the happy ending, that of the girl's face from the angle that distorts her features turning the angelic face into the sinister cynical mask that could belong to the creature of the darkest nightmares and with two huge black holes of eyes is the most horrifying one in the movie which is packed with the scenes of horror. None of them is as disturbing, unsettling and memorable as this face - happy end according Terry Gilliam.

I was very intrigued by the range of opinions about this film, and I'm kind of agnostic about Gilliam at the best of times so could have gone either way. In the event, it seems to me like a very personal, smallscale and risky film - the kind of thing major directors don't do often enough.

Gilliam introduced the screening I attended by saying that plenty of the (invited) audience would hate the film. He also said that its subject is the resilience of children, in a world where we're encouraged to treat them as helpless victims most of the time.

I was pretty much enthralled from the opening scene. Jeff Bridges plays a character who's like the dark side of the Dude. A semicoherent junkie who's trained his daughter to cook up his heroin shots for him, he'd be the world's worst parent figure if it wasn't for the mother, a grotesque Courtney caricature who seems to me to be the only person in the film Gilliam's unable to summon up any liking for.

Events lead us into the wheatfields of the midwest and the story takes off into completely unforeseeable territory. There are countless reference points touched on over the next hour or so, in a very playful way - everything from Dorothy's farmhouse and her encounters with witches and brainless tin men, to the dinner table scene in Texas Chainsaw Massacre, to Psycho, to Jan Svankmeyer and The Bride of Frankenstein, and in what's either a major theft or a loving homage, one of the plot points of The Butcher Boy becomes a central event here.

The storyline takes detours into whimsy and the massively grotesque - there are two scenes here that will stay with me for weeks, one featuring a sex act in a taxidermist's workshop, the other best left undescribed - but there seems to me to be a central interest in the way that kids keep themselves sane through the most extreme circumstances, through imagination and play, and through projecting their fears onto made-up characters, that really shows an understanding of the way children's minds work.

The main character, the kid, is tremendously convincing, funny and - in the end - heartbreaking. I think this film might just stand with classics like Voice of the Beehive and Bernard Rose's totally underrated Paperhouse as one of the great films about solitary children and their imaginations, and their ability to rise above their fears.