(This is the review of Tideland I wrote after seeing it.  It is badly written and not really edited.  Partially this is because I am lazy, and partly it is because I am busy.  On the other hand, random stabs at description and half explained impressions may be the best way to express a Terry Gilliam film.  See what you think.)

Tideland is a movie unlike anything you’ve ever seen before.  It is beautiful and horrible, uplifting and traumatizing, and utterly unforgettable.  It is one of those films that seeps into you, unsettles your mind, and demands that you think about it.  That is not to say it is overly intellectual.  The reason it sticks is that it is an extremely emotional film, pulling in directions that are rarely experienced and almost never even acknowledged, much less addressed, on film, certainly never this way.  It is both a deceivingly simple story and a complex magical nightmare made with a care and affection that is rarely seen in art, much less film.  In short, it is a Terry Gilliam film. 

More than that, it is the Terry Gilliam film.  The themes and ideas which have been prevalent in his work since the very beginning are front and center.  While the story is not a Gilliam original, it might as well be.  I have not read the book by Mitch Cullin, which Gilliam dubbed “Fucking wonderful” in his prepublication blurb for the book years ago, but this film is the one Gilliam has been trying to make for decades.  Cullin’s story is the perfect thematic framework for Gilliam to explore imagination, innocence, nightmares, insanity, a child’s view point, the ability to cope with reality, and on and on.  Gilliamland, as Michael Palin dubbed it.  The meeting of material and director is symbiotic, in the best sense of the word.

Trying to summarize the film is tricky, since it is something that must be experienced.  Each change, plot point, character moment, and event in the film is something that should be felt, rather than noted in passing.  That said, I will try to summarize while leaving most of it out.  The film centers on Jeliza-Rose, a young girl who is suddenly moved from the city into the country by her junkie father.  In a ramshackle house with her only friends being her three doll heads, which she gives distinct personalities, Jeliza is more or less left to her own devices.  There is the basic premise, but it does not describe the film.

As a quick note, this film is carried, completely, by Jodelle Ferland, as Jeliza, in a truly amazing performance.  There is no insipid Dakota Fanning “aren’t I cute” crap here, no child acting “like and adult” for effect, a la Haley Joel Osment.  There is a real child on screen behaving like a real child in extreme circumstances.  Gilliam’s ability to get kids to play actual kids, not Hollywood’s idea of how kids behave, is undeniable.  Time Bandits and Baron Munchausen prove that, but this performance completely surpasses those earlier films.  Jeliza is a fully developed character, a feeling, thinking, imagining, suffering, rebounding, surviving human being, yet one young enough to create her own world in the face of misery.  At the same time, the last word that can be used to describe this film is escapist.   

Gilliam knows that reality and imagination are never separate or very far from each other.  The two realms effect and warp each other.  An event in one will appear in another shape in the other.  For Jeliza her world of imagination is a way of dealing with reality around her, but she cannot escape those events.  As her life darkens around her, her fantasies become larger, grander, more developed, but they also become more dangerous, both physically and emotionally.  What can be debated is whether she notices. 

She exists in a scary world, surrounded by the insane and mentally handicapped.  She has never had any sane example, and therefore her understandings of the world are never even pretended to be healthy.  This is a movie that starts dark and goes pitch black, lit only by an oncoming train, but it does it with immense beauty and empathy.

Jeliza’s tool for survival is her imagination.  She recreates reality in order to be able to float on its surface.  The insane neighbor is recreated into a witch and her mentally challenged brother into a heroic shark hunter.  The old house is transformed in to a place of adventure and mystery.  And, most spectacularly, the prairie location is transformed into an ocean, in what has to rank as one of the most beautiful sequences of any Terry Gilliam film.

Throughout all of this, however, there is a sense that Jeliza is being towed out further to sea by the minute.  Her reliance on her imagination is so extreme and so important, while reality becomes so dangerous and disturbing, that watching Jeliza slip away into her own reality, which we, from the outside find increasingly disturbing, is heartbreaking. 

Gilliam, perhaps more than any other film-maker, understands something very important.  Creativity and imagination are not different from insanity.  They are on the same spectrum, and there is no defined line between the two.  Throughout the film there are references to Alice and Wonderland.  Jeliza reads it to her father and imagines the plummet down the rabbit hole later in the film.  The two protagonists of these two tales share a sudden change in state, and sudden thrust into a land of imagination and magic, and in both tales this is not a safe place to be.  What most parents don’t remember, and what Disney never understood, is that the rabbit hole holds adventure and wonder, but within it also lurks madness and fear.

As an audience we watch Jeliza slide, slip, and ultimately welcome her life, her imaginary one, and disconnect completely from reality.  We see the horrors when she ceases to.  The amazing ability of Gilliam is to make a heroine we sympathize with, empathize with, feel protective toward, and fear for out of a 10year old actress.  The audience becomes so fearful for her that they welcome a disaster, as in it, amidst the flame and death, there is a chance for Jeliza to be rescued.

I feel that a word must also be said about the critical reaction to the film.  First it is overwhelmingly positive in Europe and the polar opposite in the US.  US sensibilities are too conservative, too locked into the cute kid mentality of Hollywood to let this film be appreciated.  Further, it has become a self-fulfilling prophecy.  I will explain further, but I must warn that there may be more hints that should be read only after seeing the film. Before you go, however, you should know that many of the reviews are hallucinatory reactionary.  There is no incest, only a mention of child molestation as happening many years a go, no underage sex, no cannibalism, and no hot mentally challenged person on little girl action.  All of these things have been mentioned in reviews and NONE of them actually happen.  I found the film to be hard to sit through because I kept waiting for them to happen.  There are several places where you can see it possibly going one direction or anther and want to shield your eyes, but it doesn’t go there.  Watch the film with a clear mind.  Let the dark Freudian projections of the American film critic establishment boil in their own heads, not yours.

Now go see the film!

Great, now that you are back…

I think that the film creates such a strong emotional imprint on the American critics that they create reasons for it to be unsettling by misunderstanding the film entirely.  They make idiotic associations, calling the mentally challenged character is “an ADHD Forrest Gump,” for instance (you know, like how all Sidney Poitier ever did was copy Al Jolson.  Cause they were both “black”…  so they were the same…), or they read incest into it, overreact to a child’s crush, refuse to see the world through a child’s eyes, and loose track of what is really on the screen and what they imagine there is.  This is not only ironic; it is possibly the best testament to Gilliam’s power.

As we sat down at the theater it was introduced by one of my old film professors, a know-it-all pseudo-wit who does not so much watch films as sit there trying to think of clever things to say about them.  Anyway, he said “I don’t want to give too much away, but what happens to her father shouldn’t happen to a dog!”  I agree, however it happens to many dogs, and deer, and bears, and squirrels every year.  Ask Rowdy from Scrubs.  His sense of disgust at this happening to a human is understandable, but to say that to an audience so ridiculous.  We sat there waiting for him to graphically be drawn and quartered, raped, explode, etc…  What does happen is weird, don’t get me wrong, but it is not nearly as disturbing as what our own imaginations can come up with to fear. 

Similarly mentions of child molestation, incest, rape, etc… created an atmosphere where every minute of film was fearful.  It was a horrible way to experience what is a brilliant film.  I think that the critics read each other’s Rorschach reviews and felt the same fear, ruining and misinterpreting the film. 

It exists from a child’s perspective, mostly, and that is how it should be understood.   However, in the US, children can only be cute, rambunctious, overly serious and creepy, or hysterically adult (like when they cuss and say things that usually an adult would say…  come on you know how funny that is…  it has to be… the canned laughter said it was.)  A fully realized child character, in itself, is enough to scare most of the critics, who accuse her of being overly sexualized and twisted.  They have forgotten that kids have crushes, kids try to understand sex, and kids struggle with interpreting the world like the rest of us. 

This is no where clearer than in the comparisons that are drawn in the reviews.  There are many mentions of it being a twisted after school special, which is bizarre, or comparing it to other “coming of age” stories, which it is not in any way.  My two favorite are actually in the Guardian, in what is actually a positive review.  It compares them to Harper Lee's Scout from To Kill a Mockingbird and Carson McCuller's Frankie from The Member of the Wedding.  Aside from being completely wrong, in every way, it is telling about how the writer understands the movie.  He sees it as a coming of age child in the midst of adversity story.  Yes, like Frankie, Jeliza is a child striking out on her own, for all intensive purposes, and yes there are neighbor’s involved, but from there they are different species, unrelated in all but the most basic ways.  The comparison to Mockingbird is the same.  It is perhaps the quintessential children come of age while interacting with a harsh world story, it is told from a child’s perspective, and there is a possibly mentally handicapped person in it, but again comparison with Tideland does nothing. 

Tideland is not about a child coming of age story.  Jeliza is not dealing with the “adult world.”  This is a child thrust into a world full of people who have long since lost their ability to deal with reality and who have long since given up and created their own realities.  This is an insane world.  Jeliza is not alone in the use of her imagination, but she is sane in a way of which others cannot be accused.  At the same time she is a child, resilient and strong, but subject to forming her world based on the influence of those around her, as we all are.  She is impressionable, as a child, but with very strong survival instincts.  At the end of the film she is still that child.  What we as an audience hope is that the horrible influences will be replaced with better ones.

The land this film and its characters inhabit is outside the morality and ethics of society, though the early scenes question whether such things have any effect on behavior.  The story is not a heroic child overcoming adversity.  It is not the story of her rescue.  It is not her journey into adulthood or any other destination.  Tideland is about Jeliza, a child caught in an out of control world, coping as best she can.  It is the story of a bit of the journey, and the story of a girl almost swept away by the insanity that surrounds her.  Madness and imagination, twilight and midnight, sex, death, confusion, and affection exist for her as they do for all of us, but the question is of amounts, and how the characters all deal with these things.  Jeliza, in the end, does an extraordinary job, but she is not strong enough or aware of the dangers in her world. 

Gilliam balances the benefits and dangers of being a child and the benefits and dangers of creativity and insanity in a very dark world full of frightening beauty and scorching fire.

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