[This article was first published on Flixist]
It's not a good sign when a director decides he needs to explain a
movie to his audience before they've even watched a frame of it. A
narrative experience should speak for itself, allowing its audience to
take away their own interpretations and insights. As tempting as it is
for the creator to go public and define the experience in his or her own
terms, doing so can only ever make the experience smaller, tying down
its meaning to the opinion of a single person rather than allowing it to
blossom in unspoiled minds.
If ever it were understandable for a director to take such a step though, it would be for Terry Gilliam's Tideland.
The US release was beset with problems, which Gilliam blamed on
distribution company ThinkFilm, who opted to only release the movie in
nine screens and then screwed with the aspect ration of the DVD. The
film's critical reception could be generously described as bilious, with
descriptions ranging from 'extrememly unpleasant' (Jonathan Rosenbaum,
Chicago Reader) to 'creepy, exploitive [sic] and self-indulgent' (A.O.
Scott). Gilliam has rarely been a director who finds popular
appreciation easy to come by, though, and Tideland represents perhaps his most esoteric and misunderstood movie to date.
Gilliam's
introduction may limit possible readings of the film, but is an
understandable step to have taken considering scathing reviews suggested
widespread misunderstanding of what the director was trying to achieve,
almost to the point of poisonous misrepresentation. Critics seized on
the horrific world which child protagonist Jeliza-Rose (played by the
astonishing Jodelle Ferland) must navigate, from preparing her father's
heroin shots to a pseudo-romantic relationship with man-child Dickens,
as evidence of Gilliam cynically exploiting controversial subject
matter. In truth, the movie's grim Southern Gothic trappings are an
instrumental part of an intimate work of rare bravery, turning the
traditional cinematic representation of children as defenceless and
vulnerable on its head.
Here's Gilliam's introduction to explain it in his own words:
"I suggest you try to forget everything you've learnt as an adult,"
Gilliam says. That detail is undoubtedly what the movie's detractors
were missing in their misreading of Gilliam's intent. When adults watch
Jeliza preparing drugs for her father (Jeff Bridges as a viciously
twisted variation on his Dude persona), the adult reaction is to be
horrified, even though the girl herself, who has known no other life,
sees it as nothing more than a part of her everyday existence. The
second major point of contention, her 'relationship' with Dickens, is
more complex, but I'll get to that later.
Tideland is not a film about a child suffering, or even
enduring hardship. It is a paean to a child's imagination as a defence
mechanism, perhaps the most subtle and brilliant in existence. This is a
long way from an egregious purple dinosaur gargling out
corporate-approved ditties about bringing marketable objects to life
with the power of a young brain and a long-suffering adult's spending
power. It's about imagination's power to protect an unprepared mind from
the horrors of the real world, providing a safe place to hide until
things take a turn for the better.
Children of Jeliza-Rose's age are in a constant state of processing
the world around them, determining what they will need to do to survive
into adulthood: who will protect and feed them, who will cause harm,
where it is safe to go and where it is dangerous. This is simple for
most, who have loving parents and carefree existences. The process is
still at work, though, even within the safety net of happy family
homes: the dark, for example, remains unknown and scary, so the mind
fills it with brat-devouring monsters to stay any ambitions of
venturing in until the risk can be properly understood.
If the imagination is protecting even in relative safety what happens when a child is born into a world consisting only
of darkness, where there is no light for protection? Adults are
mentally frail enough when it comes to even the most mundane of
'hopeless' situations ("I've lost my phone! OMG!"), so if we're to
understand the popular interpretation of children as weaker and more
dependent, growing up in a life of drug abuse and death should be enough
to drive a young mind to the most extreme forms of insanity.
It doesn't, though, because where adults deal with threats by
analysing them against the experiences of a rational mind, a child's
survival instinct is the ability to redraw the danger in a manner
providing just enough comfort to prevent total collapse. This ability
weakens with age and experience, forcing us to come to terms with the
difficult realisations accompanying the onset of maturity. "Children are
strong, they're resilient, they're designed to survive," explains
Gilliam. If they haven't got strength or speed or knowledge on their
side, what can a child do but turn that innocence into strength?
To give a brief outline of the plot, Jeliza is taken by her
father to a dilapidated house in remote Texas farmland after her mother
dies of an overdose. Her father, too, soon dies of the same cause, and
Jeliza goes exploring the outside world, contextualising what she
discovers through conversations with the doll heads she keeps on the end
of her fingertips. She soon comes across a weird family living not far
away, consisting of a half-blind woman named Dell and her mentally
handicapped younger brother, Dickens, who seems as deeply engrained in
his imaginary world as Jeliza is in hers.
Jeliza's friendship with Dickens, a grown man with a child's mind,
caused a lot of controversy when the film was first released, because
while nothing but a few childish kisses ever transpires between them,
her behaviour towards him certainly moves into heavy flirting. As much
as it appalled critics at the time, anyone who has seen the way a little
girl acts around boys, particularly older, will understand what is
going on. Many adults, particularly these days, are barely able to
distinguish between affection and sex. If Jeliza is playing husband and
wife or exchanging pecks on the cheek with Dickens, it's assumed Gilliam
is suggesting something unhealthy is going on. For the record, Dickens is
strongly implied to want something more, but as with many interactions
between young girls and boys, the girl is the more mature and always in
control of what is allowed and what is not.
Where Jeliza might, in a normal family, have got what she needed
through the occasional adorable look towards her father, those instincts
are forced to adapt to a different set of rules in Tideland's
Grimm farmland. She identifies Dickens as someone who can understand and
protect her in the way her father should have, were he not sitting dead
in the drawing room chair. To gain Dickens' compliance, she needs to
act differently around him than she would a male to whom she is related.
To her, it's all the same, though: innocent flirtation. Sex has nothing
to do with it. She selects Dickens because they share enough of a bond -
their mutual dependence on fantasy - to establish a connection, then
does just enough to keep him around to look after her and help make
sense of her surroundings.
If Jeliza uses Dickens as a means of safely coming to terms with the
outside world, her imagination allows her to handle her inner questions
through a series of conversations with a set of doll heads, each
representing a different part of her psyche. Since her mind is not yet
developed enough to understand the full implications of what is going on
around her, dividing up her thought processes allows her to interpret
everything she's seeing and experiencing in a manner she can handle,
building a set of links that will eventually, with the right guidance,
coalesce into an adult mind. When one of the dolls is threatened, so too
is her entire ability to make sense of the world. Through Dickens and
his family, she grows into someone capable of interacting with others.
Through her dolls, she finds a way of piecing herself back together.
It's not a perfect film, with the invocation of Alice In Wonderland
an appropriate if obvious touchstone, and an ending which broadly fits
Gilliam's themes but is the only moment threatening to merit the
accusations of exploitation. Looking back, even had it received the
distribution and appropriate marketing (poster tag line: 'The squirrels
made it seem less lonely.' Seriously?!) it deserved, the film's
reception probably wouldn't have been much warmer. For anyone who has
suffered in childhood, it's an elegant and even heartening parable about
a child's ability to find strength and a path to safety in even the
most terrible of circumstances. Tideland is a tribute to that
strength, heartening to those who have been forced to draw on it, but
utterly alienating to the many who have thankfully never needed to and
mistakenly see all children and frail and breakable.
Tideland is in many ways the film Gilliam appears to have been
trying to make all his career, incorporating the 'child making sense of
a big, scary world' motif from Time Bandits (right down to the lead character being orphaned); Brazil's conceit of imagination as freedom; 12 Monkeys' questioning of the nature of insanity, and just a little of The Fisher King's
character arc from tragedy to recuperation. It's the ultimate cult
entry in the canon of one of modern filmmaking's most naturally divisive
and opinionated directors, a film seemingly made to be appreciated only
by those few to have stood on that melancholy tideland, all littered
with the flotsam of hopes and dreams.
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