Jan. 23, 2007 - Issue #588: Factotum

Terry Gilliam’s Tideland comes in as murky as ever

Tideland is a fitting metaphor for the career of Terry Gilliam, who’s braved the choppy waters of movie-making ever since he sailed on to the big screen from those quirky animation sketches he created with England’s Monty Python.

First he was at the helm for the troupe’s madcap, low-budget take on medieval history, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, then he launched the Lewis Carroll-inspired Jabberwocky. Since then, his ebbs and flows of fortune have seen the near studio-sinking of the mighty Brazil, the studio-wrecked Adventures of Baron Munchausen, the mainline success of The Fisher King, voyages to darker, stranger lands with 12 Monkeys and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and the unsalvaged driftwood of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (Keith Fulton’s and Louis Pepe’s Lost in La Mancha documented Gilliam’s near-Titanic failure to adapt Cervantes’s novel).

Gilliam churned out the mainstream The Brothers Grimm in order to finance his latest, a return to Carroll’s Alice stories and the world of childish imagination that Gilliam has previously painted in lighter shades. Tideland, though, is a Gothic Wonderland, a girl’s fantasy world that darkly and grotesquely re-imagines the nightmarish reality she’s suffering through. This comic fantasy is an acquired taste—as dark and bitter as a cup of black coffee, there’s nothing saccharine or light about Tideland.

Jeliza-Rose (Jodelle Ferland) has grown up with junkie parents, Queen Gunhilda (Jennifer Tilly) and Noah (Jeff Bridges), enduring her mother’s twitches between neediness and nastiness while helping her father shoot up. After Gunhilda overdoses, Noah takes his daughter back to his Prairie homestead (the film was shot around Regina), abandoned since his mother died. There, Jeliza-Rose travels further and further into the fields of her imagination, playing with her doll heads and striking up a friendship with Dickens (Brendan Fletcher, in the film’s other stellar performance), who’s had brain surgery for his epilepsy. Ferland, who has to carry the film, is a remarkable talent, and Tideland often simply trips and tumbles along with her as she talks to herself and plays games. In these moments, buoyed by Ferland’s wide-eyed hopefulness and piques of mood, Gilliam shows childhood as full of childish promise and adult failure, hopefully resilient and adaptable but also mimicking adult moods: imperious authority, flashes of temper, self-absorption.

There are some interesting ideas here, too, about imagination’s flights plummeting into fanatical missions of destruction and resurrection: the grass-snorkeling Dickens is determined to blow up the train he thinks is a shark, while his taxidermist sister Dell (Janet McTeer) even lacquers and preserves human corpses, waiting for their bog body-like corpses to reawaken.

Yet this adaptation of Mitch Cullin’s novel never quite coheres. While the camera tilts and turns at 45-degree angles among the amber-hued Prairies, a sense of dreaminess never fully filters through. Dickens’s surgery and obsession with atomic bombs seems ’50s-ish, but other details suggest our day and age. The Alice allusions, from rabbit holes to tea-parties, don’t satisfyingly connect. Certain scenes, mostly those with Tilly—imagine Courtney Love as an evil stepmother—or Bridge’s cranked-up Dude of a dad, are both shrill and stiff.

But Gilliam, now in the twilight of his career, has still made an admirable—and, at times, daring—oddity. While not as bewitchingly Gothic as, say, Pepe’s and Fulton’s recent Brothers of the Head, Tideland’s look at a young girl’s confused introduction to adult sexuality, gender-switching, and death is disturbingly different from most celluloid childhoods.

The last scene, like the film, is intriguingly unclear—the camera fades out until only the light of Jeliza-Rose’s eyes remain, those eyes glassy with ... more freaks of fancy? or the pain her imagination can no longer confront? As the child is wrenched in and out of a dark adult world, we’re buffeted along with her, trying to navigate the unsteady currents of Gilliam’s murky vision. V

Fri, Jan 26 & Sun, Jan 28 (9 pm);
Sat, Jan 27 & Mon, Jan 29 (7 pm)
Tideland
Directed by Terry Gilliam
Written by Gilliam, Tony Grisoni,
Mitch Cullin
Starring Jodelle Ferland,
Brendan Fletcher, Janet McTeer
Metro Cinema, $8

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