Tideland: A FilmExposed Review

A FilmExposed Review

Tideland (15)

Dir: Terry Gilliam, 2005, USA, 118 mins
Cast: Jodelle Ferland, Jeff Bridges, Jennifer Tilly, Janet McTeer, Brendan Fletcher

Anyone who managed to catch Lost In La Mancha (2002) knows only too well how much of a blessing a new Terry Gilliam film truly is. Time, the elements, production companies, finance committees and Terry Gilliam work against Gilliam on the filmmaking merry-go-round. Yes, he is a master of peeling back the scalp and plunging headfirst into the imagination but his productions are prone to careening wildly over budget in attempting to contain his frenetic vision.

This time around, Gilliam seems to have successfully swaddled his latest baby, Tideland. Gilliam has clearly made every effort to stay faithful to his source material (Mitch Cullin's book of the same name). Though Tideland plays almost wholly through the fertile imagination of childhood, it is a much-grounded experience. And a disturbing one.

Young Jeliza-Rose (Ferland) has seen more in her first decade of life than most manage to catch in four. While she "cooks up" and cleans for her parents, her ex-rocker father (Bridges – in fine form) enchants her with dreams of far off places. When the efforts of her mother (Tilly) to kick her heroin habit fail dramatically, Jeliza-Rose and her father journey back to his crumbling childhood home in the dusty prairies of the American Midwest. There, with only four dolls heads for company, Jeliza-Rose plays the days away, oblivious to the macabre turn her life has taken.

Tideland is Gilliam's take on childhood innocence and, not surprisingly, Gilliam's world is gritty and uncomfortable; a kind of Alice In Wonderland meets The Hills Have Eyes (1977). Jeliza-Rose is a true child: capricious, selfish and pig-headedly resilient. As Gilliam forces her down the rabbit hole, the elaborate fantasies Jeliza-Rose wraps herself in give him a beautiful palate with which to paint her dreams of love and family.

The visual fabric of Tideland lays closer to The Fisher King (1991) than Gilliam's more lavish works (The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1998)). There are flights of visual fancy but they are fleeting and far between, often woven imperceptibly into the sun-baked folds of the landscape and the layered, cluttered interiors of the dilapidated prairie house. As with most of Gilliam's films, he has eschewed digital effects in favour of more tactile methods and the reward is a rich and dusty tapestry.

The real magic in Tideland is seen through the eyes of Jeliza-Rose, a necessary magic, for without the cushioning of Jeliza-Rose's imagination, the world of Tideland would be altogether too uncomfortable to watch. It is an extremely effective device and in exploiting it, Gilliam successfully in exposes the true role of fairytales in our lives, far more successfully than he did in last year's disappointing The Brothers Grimm.

Drugs, death and sexuality bleed through Tideland and it is a mark of his kinship with Cullin's novel that Gilliam manages to skirt controversy and emerge with one of his most mature films to date. Tideland, despite its outlandishness, rings true. An absorbing anti-fairytale for adults with strong stomachs.

Michael Scott

Tags: movie review, cinema, FilmExposed