Gone for Good

Terry Gilliam disappears down the rabbit hole.

by Shaun Brady

Now settled firmly into Orson Welles' career trajectory, alternating ever-more-baroque failures with diminishing triumphs, Terry Gilliam has seemingly reached the Mr. Arkadin phase with Tideland. A story of minor-key horrors told at an unrelentingly hysterical pitch, Gilliam's adaptation of Mitch Cullin's novel seems determined to prove that the visionary iconoclast hasn't yet been reduced to chastened eccentric.

Read Sam Adams' interview with Terry Gilliam. 

Lacking Welles' alchemical ability to spin personal triumph out of generic dross (a la Touch of Evil), Gilliam was unable to overcome Hollywood banalities and create more than an intriguing disappointment with The Brothers Grimm. Now that he's back in firmer control, the director seems determined to announce his authorship from every frame, drowning out even the overwrought intensity of onscreen events.

Tideland opens with young Jeliza-Rose (Jodelle Ferland) playing under the abandoned husk of a bus in a sea of wheat, the film's one moment of joy unblemished by the oppressive ugliness that will come to shade even this scene. The story then steps a few paces back to find Jeliza-Rose living with her parents, Jeff Bridges as a has-been (or never-was) rock star and Jennifer Tilly as his screeching wife, an abrasive interpretation that suggests Courtney Love as played by Roseanne. It may not be a compliment to say that Gilliam places her performance into surroundings large enough to contain it.

Bridges regales his daughter with promises of visiting Denmark, a curious dream until it becomes obvious that his idea of the place is more colored by Norse mythology than modern reality. But destination is irrelevant considering that Bridges' regular "vacations" are merely temporary comas induced by smack dutifully prepared by Jeliza-Rose. When he bursts into her room one night excited over reading about bog waters that preserve bodies without decay, it's clear that his days of living fast are long over, the process of dying young is overdue, and the only work left is ensuring the good-looking corpse.

After Tilly ODs, father and daughter take off for the sanctuary of his deceased mother's house, a ramshackle affair standing in that deceptively bright wheat field. When Bridges finally departs on a permanent vacation, Jeliza-Rose forms a makeshift family with the neighbors, a mentally handicapped epileptic named Dickens (Brendan Fletcher) and his older sister Dell (Janet McTeer), a demented one-eyed taxidermist. If her old life pictured a future for a Cobain family if Kurt had learned to live amid the suffering, Jeliza-Rose's new surroundings suggest the Bates Motel a few more years and miles removed from the highway, well on its way to becoming the Texas Chainsaw homestead.

Gilliam's characters have always had a tenuous hold on reality, but up until now he's always managed to suggest an escape route. Jeliza-Rose does invent a fantasy life for herself, with doll heads for companions and talking squirrels chattering in the attic, but her dress-up games involve melodramatic death throes and her imaginary friends bicker endlessly and mutilate one another. It's as if she has to create an imaginary world that manages to throw her squalid reality into positive relief.

When Jeliza-Rose commingles her inventions with those of Dickens, their pasts reveal a commonality where innocence is relative, and the pair embark on a mirthless parody of love. Neither recognizes more than a secondhand description of beauty, content simply to color over the ugliness, whether painting the walls of her dilapidated farmhouse or slathering makeup on her father's corpse, ignoring the stench of decay that still wafts from underneath the garish surface.

This is not one of those tales of parental neglect that suggests that a child left on her own can manage to shoulder her burden. While more level-headed than her addled father, Jeliza-Rose has learned not responsibility but only survival. Her friendship with Dickens teeters treacherously on the edge of further tragedy, but while Gilliam walks the tightrope with his audience's nerves, the surrounding exaggeration only serves to blunt the impact of this more subtle provocation.

The director approaches every scene from acutely canted angles with a seasick camera that implies that the reality of what he presents is too horrific to be looked at straight on. Perhaps this is Gilliam's attempt to illustrate the world from Jeliza-Rose's point of view (the novel was told first-person). But the result is curiously distant from her experience, feeling not like her skewed perspective on reality but Gilliam's schematic re-enactment of it.

Tideland opens with Jeliza-Rose reading from Alice in Wonderland, the first of many quotations that evoke Lewis Carroll more literally than a film about a young girl's flight from reality probably needs to. The difference is that Alice eventually hits bottom; once Jeliza-Rose starts down the rabbit hole, the rest of the film is one prolonged plunge, the sickening descent finally settling into an unpleasant monotony. Gilliam never lets her stop long enough to find Wonderland.

(s_brady@citypaper.net)

Tideland

Directed by Terry GilliamA ThinkFilm release Opens Friday at Ritz Bourse