Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with our first negative review of Terry Gilliam's TIDELAND, from our own Copernicus. I've been known to disagree with our star-gazing spy before and I hope I disagree with him on this one, too. I might be blinding myself, but as a Gilliam fan I want this movie to rock. I guess I won't know until I see it for myself, but I have faith in Gilliam... Hell, for a year or two I thought the only people in the world that liked FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS were Johnny Depp, Harry, Father Geek, Gilliam and me. Sometimes his movies don't hit right away... I still can't wait to see this, but Copernicus does have a point about keeping our expectations in check. Enjoy the review!
COPERNICUS here with the first of my reviews from the Toronto FIlm Festival. I've been trying to pack everything into the few days I have here before flying to Austin to catch the end of QT6. I've been seeing so many movies that I've hardly had a chance to write, but when I saw Harry getting his hopes up about TIDELAND, I decidedit was time to take everyone's expectations down a notch.
TIDELAND broke my heart. Terry Gilliam is one of my favorite directors – he has a unique vision, he doesn't play by the rules, and at his best he takes you to places you could not possibly imagine on your own. Though his struggles with finding the appropriate financing to realize his extravagant dreams are legendary, I fear TIDELAND could make it that much harder. It pains me to say this, because I don't like to fault risk takers, but the reality is that this is his third spectacular failure in a row.
At the heart of the movie is Jeliza-Rose (Jodelle Ferland), the child of an abusive mom (played way over the top by Jennifer Tilly) and heroin-addicted dad Noah (a decidedly dudelike Jeff Bridges). Thankfully, Jennifer Tilly's character is killed off early, and father and child take off to the an old decrepit house in the Prairies. Once she is there, Jeliza-Rose finds that she can't depend on her father and must fend for herself against the bee-obsessed, corpse-shellacking, witchy neighbor Dell (Janet McTeer) and her dangerously retarded brother (Brendan Fletcher). Jeliza retreats into her own fantasy word where her four doll heads talk to her and she sees fairies in the abandoned hull of a bus by the train tracks.
The traumatized child with an imaginary life and a fort by the train tracks was tackled to much greater effect last year by Danny Boyle with MILLIONS. If you took all of the mirth and warmth out of that movie and set it in the ridiculous world of the second-worst movie ever made, NOTHING BUT TROUBLE, you would start to get some idea of what TIDELAND is like. That Gilliam magic fails to take off because the soul-crushing bleakness of the girl's situation hopelessly extinguishes any sense of whimsy.
Sure, I could recognize this as a Terry Gilliam movie from the interesting camera angles, the beautiful images, and the perverse characters, but the saddest thing is that I didn't care about any of that because I was so uninvested in the proceedings. There is no real driving narrative for us to latch onto. The second half of the movie seems like just high jinks with corpses and setting up disturbing situations for no more reason than shock value.
The one bright spot in the movie for me was the performance of Jodelle Ferland as the little girl. She is truly incredible, sometimes having to have whole conversations with herself through her doll heads. Some credit must also go to Terry Gilliam for coaxing such a performance out of such an inexperienced actor.
I have given a lot of thought to trying to figure out the target audience for TIDELAND. It is a movie about a little girl, yet it is too disturbing for children. But the movie is hardly for adults, either given its obsession with fart jokes and gross-out humor. And teenagers themselves would be bored to tears. It is almost like someone bet Terry Gilliam to redefine the word "unmarketable."
Even Gilliam himself admitted that this is a hard movie to love. Before the screening he said that the huge Elgin Theater was too big for this "small little movie." He also said "try to keep an open mind," and that most people don't like it right away, but some come around after a few days of thinking about it. Then as he finished his remarks he said "Enjoy the show…. Well, maybe enjoy is not the right word."
TIDELAND is not the worst movie ever made, but it is easily the worst Terry Gilliam movie. Before Saturday's screening I had such trust in him as a director that I would see anything he made unconditionally. I blamed THE BROTHERS GRIMM on the studio. But now after being burned yet again, I think I'm going to read the reviews first before I see his next movie. It is hard to fault Mr. Gilliam completely, though. I'd rather have him gamble large and occasionally fail than have him become conservative and formulaic.
-COPERNICUS
