The Pundit

Tideland

By Kim Edwards ⋅ August 7, 2006 ⋅  Email This Post ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

It’s beautiful and terrible. I’m so glad I saw it’and I don’t think I’ll ever want to watch it again.
Tideland is the latest addition to cult director Terry Gilliam’s fascinating oeuvre, and like many of his movies such as Brazil, 12 Monkeys and the ill-fated and incomplete The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, it is thematically and stylistically obsessed with divisions between reality and fiction, madness and reason, horror and humour.

Jeliza-Rose (played by extraordinary Jodelle Ferland) is a little girl living with junkie parents (Jeff Bridges and Jennifer Tilly) who alternatively coddle and abuse her, depending on their current drug intake. Jeliza-Rose, however, remains in blissful and callous ignorance of her plight, even when her hallucinating father takes her to the squalid and deserted family farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, and she meets her terrifying American Gothic neighbours. Accompanied by her macabre fingerpuppet doll heads, she turns the eerie, neglected and horrendous world in which she lives into a charming and delightful fantasy land, straight from the pages of her favourite Alice in Wonderland.

With nods to other children’s texts like the Narnia Chronicles and The Secret Garden, Tideland creates a child’s reality so mad and disturbing that it’s little wonder Jeliza-Rose thinks everyone is just playing her games. There is so much possibility for horrors that never quite eventuate, for dangers the child is skirting and never sees. I smiled and even laughed at her na‚àöÔø?ve and matter-of-fact reactions to poverty, drug use, sex, and even death; but the charm and humour is addled always by the black comedy of wide-eyed innocence coping determinedly with the most revolting and disturbing sides of life.

Grotesque in the extreme, this is a beautiful nightmarish journey down the rabbit hole’and what a trip it is.