Film Reviews

Tideland

• Rating:
• Director: Terry Gilliam
• Starring: Brendan Fletcher
• Details: Canada / UK / 120mins (15s).

An alternative title for Tideland - Gilliam's return to independent cinema after the mainstream The Brothers Grimm - could have been Alice In No Funderland or even Through The Looking Glass Darkly; Tideland is a strange, dreamscape of a film that teeters on the edge of reality and fantasy while never fully engaging the two. 8-year old Jeliza-Rose (Ferland) desperately wants to hang on to some childish wonder as her drug-addled parents have her busy cooking up heroin. When her mother (Jennifer Tilly) overdoses, Jeliza-Rose and her father Noah (Jeff Bridges) take off for Grandma's rural farmhouse somewhere in the Midwest but any new-found joys are quickly quashed when Noah too overdoses. Left alone in the house with a dead body, Jeliza-Rose keeps herself occupied by communicating with her four doll heads and making friends with the mentally retarded but imaginative neighbour Dickens (Brendan Fletcher).Gilliam revisits the off-the-wall direction and storytelling of 12 Monkeys and Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas in this risky adaptation of Mitch Cullin's novel. It takes some time getting used to Gilliam's unique direction (that of a madcap Terrence Mallick) and the strange plot, but once it settles down, Gilliam can take you places where you've never been before. He would be nowhere if it weren't for his lead though. Confidently inhabiting the five characters (herself and the four heads) she's given, Ferland commands the screen like an old hand and delivers a performance that veers from the creepy to wide-eyed innocence, sometimes even in the same scene. Her co-star, Brendan Fletcher, doesn't show her up and convinces as the inbred boy. Fans will be both pleased and confused at Gilliam's latest turn, and whatever they may think, they have to concede that Tideland is one of a kind.

Review by Gavin Burke