New Orleans Film Festival: Tideland
Review by Fritz Esker
The juxtaposition of fantasy and reality has taken center stage in a lot the films of Terry Gilliam (formerly of Monty Python). Sometimes, these contrasts make for very effective films. In particular, The Fisher King is a moving examination of a man who has retreated into a fantasy world because he cannot face the grief he feels over the random murder of his wife. Tideland seems to aspire for something similar. Jeliza-Roze (Jodelle Ferland) is a little girl with two heroin-addicted parents (Jeff Bridges and Jennifer Tilly). Already the most responsible member of the family, she dutifully shoots her father up with heroin and makes sure his cigarettes don't burn the house down when he passes out.
Within the film's first thirty minutes or so, both parents unsurprisingly disappear from young Jeliza-Rose's life (although her dad stays around in a really icky way). She retreats into a fantasy world where she talks to four decapitated doll's heads and flees from imaginary bog men. Stuck in her father's dilapidated ancestral home in a dreary field somewhere in the South, she eventually makes human contact with two neighboring nutcases: Dell (Janet McTeer), who has a fixation with bees, and Dickens (Brendan Fletcher), an adult man with the mind of a ten-year-old.
As always with any Gilliam film, there are some striking visuals. Unfortunately, the film as a whole just does not work....at all. A beautiful film could be made about a child retreating to a fantasy world to escape a particularly unpleasant real life. However, for such a film to work, the reality has to seem real. In Tideland, the real life sequences seem more ludicrous than the fantasy sequences. None of the characters feel real in any way, shape, or form. They are aggressively cartoonish and uncomfortably grotesque. Above all else, they feel fake and, as a result, the film feels fake as well. Compare this to The Fisher King, where the film's "real" scenes felt painful in an authentic way, and Tideland's failure becomes even more evident.
None of the actors do much to help the film out, either. While he is only in the film for the opening third, Jeff Bridges gives what is by far the worst performance of his career as the drug-addled father. The script does not help him, but Bridges, normally a fine actor, adds no subtlety or nuance to the role.
There is one scene in the film that serves as a microcosm for the movie as a whole. Jeliza-Rose and her father ride on a bus to get to the father's ancestral home. The dad, strung out on heroin, talks loudly, obnoxiously, and incoherently. If this is not enough, he then farts for an interminable amount of time before finally vomiting on the bus. All the while, the bus' other passengers look on in noticeable discomfort. In this scene, the Bridges character is Tideland, and the audience is the other passengers on the bus, trapped watching something they desperately want to get away from.
To be fair, Gilliam is a talented director and one who is never afraid to take risks. Often, he has trouble getting his films made as a result. This makes it doubly painful seeing such a talented director take such a big swing and miss so completely.