Tideland

Many reviews have touted Terry Gilliam's Tideland as a return to form after the mess of last year's Weinstein-complicated The Brothers Grimm, and it is that. What the reviews fail to mention, however, is how challenging a film Tideland is. That may seem redundant, but it is worth a reminder that Gilliam's best work is not easily digested.

Tideland is the story of a young girl, without an ordinary plot or antagonist to commercialize things, and it takes place in the most Gilliam-esque world since 1998's Fear and Loating in Las Vegas. Case-in-point, there is not a level, static shot in the film for almost 30 minutes. Factor in an eight-year-old girl cooking heroine for her loser daddy (Jeff Bridges), being called a bitch by her bitch-of-a-mother, and playing kissing games with a lobotomized, adult epiliptic and you have a film that is probably too much for the majority of American filmgoers.

But that's kind of the point. Terry Gilliam is the sort of filmmaker who must make movies that push the envelope of the acceptable and even the tasteful. Here he juxtaposes the innocence of Jeliza-Rose (Jodelle Ferland) against a truly disturbing backdrop of drug use, death and sex, creating one of those few films that truly invoke the innocence of childhood. (Count last year's Pan's Labyrinth in that number as well.)

Some might question this choice, yet what better way to reveal than to challenge? Fear and Loathing turned our views of the drug culture and America on our heads by reveling in their humorous excesses and revealing in the end the horrifying and honest result.

What Gilliam has created here is a film that will have many crying foul citing "extreme and inappropriate content" due to the presence of a child, yet it is a story of hope. In finding his inner child, as he claims in the DVD introduction, Gilliam has championed the resilience of children, the inner strength that tends to fall by the wayside when we coddle them. This is not a film for children, but a film for adults who have forgotten their childhood and the innocence inherent therein. Gilliam is attempting to revive the childlike resilience that our adulthood has beaten into hiding. He has shown us hope for a future that adults seem so intent on fucking up, and in so doing has hopefully helped some of us recapture the innocence that makes that hope possible.


Note: I recommend renting but not purchasing the ThinkFilm DVD release of Tideland. The flick was filmed in 2.35:1 and cropped slightly for DVD by Gilliam, yet ThinkFilm has unconscionably cropped the image further to an "anamorphic full-frame" ratio of 1.77:1. A ridiculous move since the only likely viewers of a Terry Gilliam movie are hardcore cineastes, the kind of people who actually care about the presentation of their art.