Cast: Jodelle Ferland, Janet McTeer, and Jeff
Bridges
Director: Terry Gilliam
120 minutes (15) 2005
Arrow Blu-ray region B
Rating: 8/10
Review by Christopher Geary
“This is not a vacation.” Contentious and controversial
fantasy comedy-drama, Tideland is set
in rural Texas, with a southern gothic atmosphere that was shot in Canada
without irony. Noah (Jeff Bridges) is a melancholic redneck junkie, and a
completely tragic wreck of humanity, redeemed only by the briskly romanticised
fairytale views of his precocious and amusingly melodramatic young daughter
Jeliza-Rose (Jodelle Ferland). Orphaned by the sudden deaths of her parents Jeliza-Rose
happily escapes from her grim reality into a wild-child’s shattered and
morbidly challenging dreamscape, where even a passing train is likened to a
monster shark, and quarrying explosions on an open mining site marks an
apocalyptic wasteland edge of the known world.
Before she’s lost down a revisionist Alice-in-Wonderland
rabbit-hole of jagged memories and allusive imagination, the lonely little girl
depends upon her Barbie heads for spooky companionship, but slowly descends
into a waking state of broken filmic taboos and her sundry whitewashed
nightmares. Eventually, she falls in with the disturbingly eccentric neighbours,
brain-damaged Dickens (Brendan Fletcher), and his formidably demented sister
Dell (Janet McTeer), a “keeper of the silent souls” via her taxidermy hobby.
Terry Gilliam directs with a keen eye for painterly
visuals, rich in colour, artistic textures, and menacing images, and this
emerges from the joylessly designer immaturity of its critically lambasted
cultural chrysalis as an engagingly distorted version of Tobe Hooper’s seminal black-comedy
horror The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
(1974), one that’s deeply innocent of grisly mortality and rustic human devils,
and thoroughly unsuitable for any closed-minded movie-watcher. Barely restrained madness appears to be
Gilliam’s default sensibility for cinematic adventures, and that bursts to the
forefront of this disconcerting wallow in child-like views of adult-world
mysteries.
Much of Tideland concerns various attempts to
get away from human death and its many grisly and testing consequences. The mother’s
body is abandoned by family and denied a Viking funeral pyre of her death-bed.
The father is vicariously resurrected by taxidermist Dell. Jeliza-Rose
appears somewhat bemused by her unburied parents’ stillness as wholly
phantasmic presences. The bodiless dolls (voiced by Ferland as parts of her
performance of Jeliza-Rose’s fantasy world) attest to the little girl’s
disquieting views of life, and what constitutes normality, where “squirrel
butts don’t glow,” or its
opposite, when a wrecked school bus, dumped close to the railway tracks, seems
more comforting in its rusty decay than a place that might otherwise (in a genre drama) be duly
haunted by ghostly children.
Despite adverse
critical reactions to Tideland, it
has recently emerged as one of Gilliam’s best movies, and one of his most
emotionally involving and cult-worthy efforts.
Disc extras:
- Gilliam’s heartfelt intro, and director's commentary track
- The 2005 documentary Getting Gilliam (45 minutes) by Vincenzo Natali
- Making-of, and technical, featurettes
- Deleted scenes, interviews, picture gallery
No comments:
Post a Comment