Contraponto

This is a movie that does not rely on SFX to impress the audience. The storytelling is amazing.

Without noticing, I was pulled into the fantasy world that this movie is. Nothing is judged, no good or evil. No clichés, no heroes. Just the story. Not entirely unlike 'Brazil'. But this movie relies less on a 'weird' future world. Sure, the atmosphere is weird. But not the surroundings. Little events, happening all the time, make up the world. It is unclear whether they are happening inside the characters head, or they are real events.

Perhaps a bit too much for most American style 'junk food film' viewers, but I hope some of the 'Hollywood Junk' producers take notice, and learn.

Too bad this movie didn't show in more theaters. A real 'must see' for those who loved 'Alice in Wonderland'

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 have never been so terrorized while watching a movie. The tension in this film is so greatly created but it makes you want to leap out of your seat, dash down the aisle, and never think about kissing again. I felt the need to take a long, hot shower after this film, as it left almost a pile of dirt on each my shoulders. When coming out of movies, I can usually express right away the emotional turnout the film provided but this left me bewildered, stunned, shocked, more adjectives. The art direction was probably some of the most beautiful I've seen, but it's hard to appreciate a film when you keep turning away and groaning in agony at what could happen next. I suggest seeing the film, as it is masterfully done and quite beautiful, but be prepared to be repulsed and saddened by all that you see.

That little girl has so much talent she's almost scary. Or, maybe, it's just at the part she played was so scary. She plays the part of a girl who is far too sophisticated. She has seen and come to grips with drug addiction, death, hunger and madness. A child normally lives in a world where there is little difference between reality and unreality, but the director, Gilliam, has taken this fact and twisted it into a nightmare existence that somehow seems acceptable. That is what is so scary about this film. The viewer can see the horror that is and the horror that is right around the corner, and also sees that the child will walk into it with her eyes wide open and yet still full of trust. And when the final, inevitable catastrophe occurs, you are left not yet knowing whether or not, or to what extent, the child survives as a human being.

There's no way for me to talk about this film without making it personal. I can recall the age of eight, wandering around the square desert of my parents' backyard, action figures in hand, thinking up stories, doing voices. Tideland plays to that sort of nostalgia, but it balances it with a darkness visible on the horizon that cancels out whatever baser desires such nostalgia plays to. I imagine when I see the film's landscape (and the house)how wonderful the setting would have been to that sort of play, how much such play could benefit from that setting, and how lost one could get in it all. Permanently lost. The fields transforming into a sea is a great metaphor for that.

Tideland is a tragedy. We, the audience, know or suspect that Jeliza-Rose isn't going to turn out well after this movie's over, that her imagination may be keeping her alive and marginally sane, but it's out of desperation (and it's clear that she understands much more of what's going on than is explicitly stated - observe her knowing looks, as in the scene where Dickens leaves her alone), that the little girl is going through so much for relatively little. In a way this film is about what many viewers incorrectly believe Gilliam's Brazil to be about: the triumph of the imagination. But, if anything, in Brazil Sam Lowry's imagination is what causes the trouble to begin with, and in the end is his last resort. In Tideland, imagination is defeated. In the end it's like one of those horror films where the heroine survives all, only to be shown walking away with the monster/killer still behind her/in her house/in the backseat of the car/etc. But there's an emotional resonance here that can't be found in, say, Halloween or A Nightmare on Elm Street because Jeliza-Rose has no literal fate, has no death but life. She returns to the real world. And I suppose that's the tragedy.

This is Gilliam's most complete film since Brazil; it has an emotional quality, an imaginative quality, and a GENUINE quality that no other Gilliam film has, and which few other films, period, have these days (cinema as it is now being so choked with irony). With Brazil we may be tempted to cry at the end if we are quick to tears, but with Tideland we may be tempted to develop tears anywhere. It reminds me of Forbidden Games, of Spirit of the Beehive, of Truffaut's Small Change, of Renoir's The River, of The Wizard of Oz, of Curse of the Cat People, and in some ways of Ford's How Green Was My Valley. It has pedigree.

Ferland's performance is nothing short of supernatural. She carries the film when it wanders or when it becomes flat out strange. She is that human voice in the wilderness.

Not that there aren't some problems. The accents are fairly ridiculous all of the time and all the supporting characters are Gothic caricatures with performances to match, but then this is a child's world and a child's field of vision, and so I can accept these. The point is that reality doesn't much enter into it. There isn't much plot to speak of and this turns up in a few draggy sections. But this film has an absorbing quality too, and I find that if I turn it on I am compelled to watch all of it.

I keep thinking of Pan's Labyrinth, which was so critically lauded while Tideland was so despised. PL's an okay movie, but it's a cynical adult tale of childhood, detached in its understanding and sort of heartless and cruel. The problem is that there is such an obvious disconnect between reality and the imaginary world. They exist separately. Of course, the Spanish Civil War setting is really no more real that Ofelia's own world, no less cartoonish than the world of Tideland. But it tries so hard to be harsh and gritty. It is just so difficult for me to *buy* Pan's Labyrinth, to take it seriously OR to NOT take it seriously. Tideland is a story about a real person living in a believable (or at least buyable)world. And I suspect that this is why Pan's Labyrinth is so critically lauded while Tideland is so critically despised - because it is unwilling to offend. Also, where PL is unfathomably ugly, Tideland is quite beautiful.

Overall, this may the only film of last year I can honestly say I liked, that made me feel anything for it. So it's good.