Tideland - 8th August 2006

I was lucky enough to see a preview screening of Tideland with introduction by Terry Gilliam and a Q&A session with the director himself afterwards. The whole evening was extremely enjoyable and most enlightening.

Since the man himself was actually present I tried my hardest to like this film. I'm a big Terry Gilliam fan and rank some of his films among my all-time favourites; so I suppose this is why I felt a bit... disappointed. I think I was expecting so much more.

There was a lot of signature Gilliam stuff in this film: for the entire two hours it teetered on the edge of surreality; flirting with it, but never slipping over the edge. One most noticeable thing was that most shots were taken at some sort of angle, we hardly ever saw a straight shot, which was slightly disorientating but then it was meant to be so. We also see-sawed between fantasy (often the imaginings of Jelizah Rose) and reality, although quite often it was difficult to tell the two apart.

There was much that was provocative and controversial. Having read quite a lot about the film (diatribes that only a sick and perverted mind could have imagined it) I was expecting much worse, but these "controversial" moments were presented as viewed through the eyes of an innocent and not meant to shock. It was during these moments that the film really came alive and the classic Gilliam absurdity shone through.

For example, the scene where Jelizah-Rose comes downstairs to find her crazy neighbour embalming the body of her dead father is more amusing than disgusting. Indeed, Gilliam's presentation of this world through the eyes of a child is so pervasive that the scene in which Jelizah-Rose finds comfort with her father's preserved corpse is more touching that anything else; and the train crash, despite causing several people's deaths, is seen as a victory for Dickens and Jelizah-Rose.

Jodelle Ferland was terrifyingly brilliant as Jelizah-Rose and the rest of the cast was similarly magnificent, especially Jeff Bridges as Jelizah's junkie father (whose unending professionalism in playing a corpse was recounted to us by Gilliam.) There was also a lot of humour in the film which was a nice offset to some of the more grisly moments.

Despite all this there was something lacking about the film. In my opinion anything which invokes the spirit of Alice In Wonderland (which Tideland did heavily: making explicit and implicit reference to it: Jelizah at one point falls down a rabbit hole and Del recites some of the Queen of Hearts's dialogue) cannot be all bad, but unlike Alice there was no real motivation for Jelizah to do anything. Whereas Alice was on a quest to find her way home Jelizah's adventures are just a collection of random events. I was at no point bored but, without any kind of overall purpose I sometimes felt I was just waiting for the next thing to happen.

I also think if this film hadn't been Gilliam's I would have been more appreciative, it was maybe just I was expecting more of the great man. Tideland gets 6.