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A Dark and Sordid Trip to Tideland
By Julian Satterthwaite
2 stars out of five
Dir: Terry Gilliam
Cast: Jeff Bridges, Jodelle Ferland, Brendan Fletcher, Jennifer Tilly, Janet McTeer
A young girl lives with her parents, both of whom are intravenous drug users. Her mother dies of an overdose. The girl moves to the country with her father. He dies of an overdose. She lives alone with his putrefying corpse for some weeks. And then things start to get really strange.
As movie synopses go, they don't come much odder. But the plot of Tideland should be no surprise when you learn that it comes from the mind of Terry Gilliam.
The former animator for Monty Python always had a baroque imagination. From the dystopian nightmare of Brazil to the fantasy worlds of The Fisher King and 12 Monkeys, Gilliam never lacked the ability to create lavish alternative worlds that dazzled the eye.
That's true of Tideland too, but it soon becomes clear that this is also Gilliam's darkest, most unsettling movie to date. The director describes it as a cross between Alice in Wonderland and Psycho--and that's not far off the mark.
Our heroine is Jodelle Ferland as Jeliza-Rose, daughter of the soon-to-be-deceased Queen Gunhilda (Jennifer Tilly) and the only slightly longer-lived Noah (Jeff Bridges).
When mom dies, father and daughter pull up stakes and head for the old family home in the country, which could charitably be described as ramshackle. There, pop soon takes the longest trip of all, and Jeliza-Rose is left with no one but her collection of dolls' heads for company.
Actually, she also keeps chatting to her dead dad throughout the film, at first because she thinks he's just more stoned than usual. Later, she seems to realize what's going on, but is too deep in denial to really accept it.
Eventually, she befriends a mentally handicapped local boy, Dickens (Brendan Fletcher), and the two bond through sharing their vivid fantasy lives. Hanging over their idyll, however, is the shadow of Dickens' mother--a deranged woman who may be friend or foe to Jeliza-Rose.
The film is Gilliam's paean to the innocence of childhood, and a warning about the corrupting nature of adulthood. When the two youngsters play together, all is literally golden, Gilliam depicting their world as a sea of swaying corn and dusk light.
But the world of adults is very different. Jeliza-Rose, of course, has a corpse for a dad. Dickens' mother, meanwhile, swathes herself from head to to toe in black to protect herself from bees, of which she is morbidly afraid. At home she brutalizes her son, and veers ever deeper into her own psychosis.
Without indulging in too much amateur psychology, it seems obvious that Gilliam identifies with the children. Tideland suggests the director, an artist known for his childlike imagination, yearns to return to those days himself. In fact, it's not too much of a stretch to see the nasty adults of the movie as stand-ins for the various studio execs that Gilliam blames for wrecking some of his projects.
Wholly unlike anything else you'll see this year, it's hard to rate Tideland. It's certainly original, and it looks as gorgeous as you would expect from this director.
But its depiction of childhood is at once warped and overidealized, while its adults are irresponsible at best, psychotic at worst. There were always demons in Gilliam's world, but there used to be some light and hope too. Now it seems there are only demons, and Tideland is a pretty sordid experience right from the opening scene, when Jeliza-Rose helps prepare heroin shots for her parents.
One thing saves the movie from irrelevance, however--the astonishing performance of Jodelle Ferland.
Of all the mad things that Gilliam does in Tideland, the most outrageous was asking a 10 year-old to carry the entire film. And yet that's the one thing that works magnificently.
Unselfconscious and entirely natural, Ferland's performance is never less than riveting. If she can avoid the numerous pitfalls of childhood celebrity, she should have quite a career ahead of her.
As for Gilliam, his future looks more uncertain. In his previous movie, The Brothers Grimm, he attempted to go commercial and ended up with a mess that was neither profitable nor artistically satisfying. Tideland suggests he has given up trying to please anyone except himself, and one wonders how much future there is in that kind of self-indulgence.
The movie opens today.
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