Tideland: Gilliam Divides and Conquers
Once upon a time, I spent an extended car ride in the backseat with my six year old cousin. She was lost in her own play world, issuing a steady monologue as she went, until suddenly she hit upon a phrase that struck me. "The window has rotten teeth," she said, amid gales of laughter. To this day, I don't know what she meant. I should have asked Terry Gilliam during the Q&A after last night's Hirshhorn screening of Tideland, his latest, and by far most difficult, film. I think he might have understood.
Because before the lights dimmed, Gilliam gave us this warning: He wanted to divide the audience for this film. He wanted us to argue about it with our friends for days, weeks to come. Forget about your fears, your prejudices, and rediscover your innocence. Pretend, he said, that you are not an adult.
Judging from the few people who walked out during the screening, and the long and rather uncomfortable silence that lasted until the credits had been rolling for nearly a minute before slow applause began to spread, Gilliam succeeded in his goal. Tideland is not the feelgood hit of the holiday season. When it premiered at film festivals a year ago, some reviews maintained that it was unreleasable. But the director stuck to his guns, and after finally finding distribution with ThinkFilm, Tideland will see theatrical release beginning next Friday.
The film is often a challenge to watch. Based on Mitch Cullin’s 2000 novel, Gilliam’s adaptation remains faithful to the sometimes shocking events which quickly made the book a cult hit. Young Jeliza-Rose (the amazing Jodelle Ferland) suddenly finds herself an orphan following the drug-related deaths of her shrill, abusive mother and junkie rocker of a father, played with appropriately Gilliam-esque excess by Jennifer Tilly and Jeff Bridges. Bridges in particular shines in an all-too-brief role that hits manic highs and thoughtful lows. Jeliza-Rose’s father is a screw-up of the highest order, make no mistake, but Gilliam and Bridges impart him with a sympathetic depth many others might not think his character even deserves.
In the aftermath, Jeliza-Rose is free to explore the empty golden Texas plains that surround the decrepit farmhouse in which she now finds herself living, accompanied only by the disembodied doll’s heads that are the constant companions and playmates of her active fantasy life. Soon, she meets her neighbors from over the hill: Dell (a nearly unrecognizable Janet McTeer), a black clad, obsessive woman who Jeliza-Rose initially mistakes for a ghost, and Dell’s brother Dickens (Brendan Fletcher), with whom she quickly forms a bond, but is an epileptic young man with an ugly lobotomy scar and an intellect that makes Forrest Gump look like Stephen Hawking.
Her adventures read like an MPAA ratings board nightmare: explicit drug use; a nine-year-old cooking heroin for her father; human taxidermy (along with a vague suggestion of sexualization of a rotting corpse); a relationship between a pre-pubescent girl and a severely mentally challenged man that becomes uncomfortably intimate for even the least squeamish of audiences.
It’s easy, though, to look at that list and assume that Tideland is brutal, harrowing, and unforgiving. Gilliam and Cullin’s triumph, though, is that in the midst of all the perverse chaos, a story emerges that is easily the most tender and even sentimental in all of Gilliam’s work. The director asks that people see the movie twice before forming a final opinion. And many people have said that they enjoy it more the second time around. The anxiety of the first viewing is difficult to overcome, fueled by a genuine fear of just what the filmmakers are going to throw on the screen next. That anxiety subsides on subsequent viewings, and one can see the oddball beauty of the story that they have constructed.
Visually, Tideland is unmistakably Gilliam. The wide angle lenses, the sometimes frenetic camera movement, the skewed angles. At times, Gilliam’s horizons are so uneven that it feels like everything onscreen is about to slide off into the blackness. Sometimes, you’re so uncomfortable you wish they would. But Gilliam understands that his subject matter is more difficult than anything he’s approached before, and so there is also a newfound willingness to let the camera linger, and to paint on canvases far more minimal than we’re used to from the director. Just when claustrophobia and anxiety are at their height, Gilliam releases his grip and allows us to exhale, a rhythm that repeats throughout the film.
Ultimately, what makes Tideland so difficult is not the subject matter so much as the perspective. Like my cousin’s odd statement regarding the dental condition of the car’s windows, the film sits squarely in a child's mind. Gilliam mentioned that the reason for changing Jeliza-Rose’s age from 12, as it was in the novel, to nine, was mainly because they couldn’t find an actress of the former age with innocence enough to pull off the role. Jodelle Ferland is onscreen in nearly every frame, and often alone on screen, as Gilliam spends vast amounts of time just watching Jeliza-Rose play with her dolls, blurring the lines between her fantasies and the bleak realities that surround her.
The believability of her performance owes greatly to the fearless logic and active fantasy world of children. As adults, though, the stream of a child's consciousness can be jarring. It’s a difficult mindset to achieve past a certain age. As Antoine de Saint-Exupery wrote, “Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.” Gilliam takes a huge risk in putting onscreen a film that most grown-ups will need explained to them; those who can forget for a couple of hours that they're adults, though, will be mesmerized.
Tideland opens in New York on October 13, and in limited nationwide release October 27. Check out the podcasts of his introduction and the Q&A (contains spoilers) on the Hirshhorn Web site.