Terry Gilliam, in an on-camera intro for “Tideland,” explains that in directing this film at age 64, he “discovered my inner child. She's a small girl.” He then says “thank you” three times.
Watching this engorged goof, a fiasco shot concurrently with Gilliam's “The Brothers Grimm,” you might mutter “no thanks” more than three times. We don't expect anything ordinary from Gilliam, the ex-Python with the wildest edge, but there are times when a movie is neither ordinary nor extraordinary, just stupid.
It begins (and will it ever end?) with the wildly imaginative girl Jeliza-Rose mired in urban hell with mom (Jennifer Tilly). Mom soon runs afoul of mixing methadone and chocolates, but for a time the cutie still has dad (Jeff Bridges), even preparing his heroin syringes. That allows Bridges to go past The Dude in “The Big Lebowski” to another cinematic frontier: posthumous flatulence.
MOVIE REVIEW
"Tideland"
Rated R;
Opens today
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That marvel comes after he fled to his ancestral nest on the lone prairie, a big, Andrew Wyeth-ish ruin where Jeliza-Rose can talk to her little doll heads (who talk back) as she runs like a freaked fawn through wild grasses. After a dose too many, daddy becomes a mummy who, as is nicely noted, “looks like a burrito.”
He looks more like smoked jerky, once drained and embalmed by neighbor Dell (Janet McTeer). She is a necrophilic nut paranoid about squirrels, and her brother Dickens is not the beloved novelist but a rather sweet, lobotomized epileptic, cranked up to Broadway levels of demented pathos by Brendan Fletcher.
True to Alice, her favorite storybook heroine, Jeliza-Rose finds her wonderland, a morbid maze of her fearful dreams and Dickens' fumbling erotic attentions. Her dolls twitter. Since Dell's mom is upstairs embalmed, looking like Ma Bates or Ma Joad sucked dry by a dust storm, morbidity escalates.
“Tideland” wanders and withers. Less gothic than slothic, this gaudy drool of depleted horror and psychodrama cliches is extravagantly designed, like all Gilliam films. It may be a cultish head trip for people who don't mind having their head removed and pickled.
Some of the failure, though blame falls on presiding juvenile Gilliam (the little girl inside him is a simpleton), is that Jodelle Ferland as Jeliza-Rose has impish talent but little star power. She's all over the movie yet vaguely marginal, without the crafty princess charisma of a Margaret O'Brien or Dakota Fanning.
Coming out of this thing, dazed, you may blink into the sunlight and wonder: Have I become a burrito?
A ThinkFilm release at the Landmark Ken Cinema. Director, writer: Terry Gilliam. Cast: Jeff Bridges, Jodelle Ferland, Janet McTeer, Jennifer Tilly, Brendan Fletcher. Running time: Two hours.
