To some extent, there’s no real surprise that the film failed to gain a foothold in people’s imaginations. While Gilliam’s direction – emphasizing a lushly surreal color palette and dynamic, disorienting camerawork – creates a visceral and phantasmagorical world for the film’s characters, the subject matter certainly toes a squeamish, uncomfortable line. The story of a girl named Jeliza-Rose (Ferland), who uses fantasy to escape the grim nature of a reality that includes heroin-addicted parents, is at heart not much different in concept than films like “Pan’s Labyrinth.” However, when you consider that Jeliza-Rose’s world is not the world of more or less passive victimization by outside forces, but one of innocent participation in gruesome situations, the queasiness isn’t accompanied by any kind of moralizing to make things palatable. Jeliza-Rose helps her parents get high by preparing and injecting the heroin. When mom dies of an overdose and dad takes her to his childhood home, eventually dying as well, Jeliza-Rose carries on obliviously. Her father’s death doesn’t quite register in expected ways, and neither does anything else.
The intersection of drugs and children is only one of the film’s apparent transgressions. Once the parents are dispatched, “Tideland” brings in Dickens, a mentally disabled young man sympathetically played by Brendan Fletcher and Dell, his psychologically volatile, even deranged, older sister disturbingly portrayed by Janet McTeer. Throw in daddy’s continued presence as an embalmed corpse and Jeliza-Rose is provided with a macabre surrogate family whose dysfunction is tinged with the threat of violence, madness, death, and warped sexuality.
Through the Eyes of Children
Yet Gilliam is quite correct in urging audiences to set aside preconceived notions and focus on the innocence of children. Jeliza-Rose occupies the twilight space between the real and the fantastic, accompanied by the severed talking doll heads and beautifully realized visions. What may be morbid or revolting, but not necessarily immoral, due to adult taboos – our own preconceptions – is subverted by her simplified childish perspective. For example, while the sexuality that eventually comes to underlie Jeliza-Rose’s and Dickens’ relationship is unsettling, it is also clearly the product of two people who fundamentally are not equipped to express or deal with it in adult ways. In another context, their innocent, child-kisses could be cute, meaningless puppy-love. It just so happens that it takes on a creepy connotation in the off-kilter world of “Tideland.”
If Gilliam doesn’t fully convince, however, the problem lies in part in Jodelle Ferland’s performance. While brilliant in its own way, meeting the unusually high demands of a role that involves the extensive use of soliloquies, it’s also not properly calibrated for the film’s purpose. Jeliza-Rose comes across less as a little girl indulging childish fantasies than one who is gripped by psychosis. The bulk of the problem, however, is actually structural. Where Cullin’s book was told in a first-person perspective, thus giving us direct access to Jeliza-Rose’s psychological innocence, Gilliam’s literally faithful film must, by necessity, rely on a third-person perspective that, however much it also consists of clearly subjective scenes, filters Jeliza-Rose’s inner world and leaves us only with her odd outward behavior.
Critically, the film and the book both share a deficiency that keeps the story from making the leap from character portrait to character study: Jeliza-Rose undergoes no tangible change. In “The Reflecting Skin,” another film about a child confronting horrific circumstances through fantastic imaginings, the story ends with the boy-hero clearly losing his innocent outlook on life. There’s no such loss (or gain) in “Tideland.” Jeliza-Rose is the same person at the end of the book as she is at the beginning. Without a sincere psychology, “Tideland” veers towards a mere parade of mostly innocent grotesqueries. It’s a shame, because however bold its premise and fearless its execution, that’s the kind of thing to make a film fall short of being a cult masterpiece.
Technical Quality: ** (out of two)
Tideland. Currently on DVD. Directed by Terry Gilliam. Written by Terry Gilliam and Tony Grisoni. Based on the book by Mitch Cullin. Starring Jodelle Ferland, Janet McTeer, Brendan Fletcher, Jeff Bridges and Jennifer Tilly. 122 minutes. Rated R for bizarre and disturbing content, including drug use, sexuality and gruesome situations – all involving a child, and for some sensuality and language – all involving teens.
