What's the matter with Kansas?
Tideland
has heroin-fueled answers.
Tideland
, the MPAA says, is "rated R for bizarre and disturbing content." Now, I can see how some prissy-ass MPAA ratings board soccer dad might want to protect his maidservants and unborn children from "disturbing" content, but "bizarre" content? How bizarre does something
have to be for there to be intervention preventing unaccompanied minors from viewing it?
The plot is a fairly
straightforward adaptation of a standard fairy-tale story: 11-year-old
***image1***
Jeliza-Rose (Jodelle Ferland) is a good girl who takes extra precaution in preparing her daddy's heroin. Sadly, Mommy (Jennifer Tilly) doesn't appreciate Jeliza-Rose, and expresses her disapproval by yelling at her and then dropping dead.
"Now we can eat all her chocolate bars!" says little Jeliza-Rose. But, no, Daddy (Jeff Bridges) says they have to move to Kansas. So Jeliza-Rose packs up her four best friends, a set of severed doll heads, and gets on the bus.
Unfortunately, when they get to Grandmother's house in the Great Plains, Grandma is already dead. Plus, after a nice big helping of extra-special heroin, Daddy stops moving and breathing. Oh no! What is Jeliza-Rose to do?
But Jeliza-Rose makes the best of her new life by decorating Daddy's corpse so it will look oh-so-pretty! Then she starts a disturbingly romantic relationship with a brain-damaged adult man. She also makes friends with a very nice one-eyed taxidermist who captures talking squirrels and fornicates with delivery men.
But wait, when does this get "bizarre"? The answer lies in the way that director Terry Gilliam and cinematographer Nicola Pecorini have shot and staged this fairy-tale story. The camera floats freely around rooms, drifting to the ceiling and sinking to the floor as though it were underwater.
The best shots occur on the wide-open wheat fields where Jeliza-Rose runs about playing make-believe. With Grandma's dilapidated two-story house jutting up in the solid-color field, a few spindly trees and some distant hills providing contrast, Gilliam and Pecorini have created something out of a bad-dream version of an Andrew Wyeth painting.
Tideland
should have been great. But it's a decidedly flawed film, and not for the reason that the ratings board would have us believe. Rather the opposite, in fact: It's just a little dull.
Gilliam is unconcerned with plot but very interested in exploring the mind of a fantasy-focused child. He does a great job weaving in bits of children's classics. And some of the fantasy sequences go beyond his normal penchant for simple weirdness to be actually illuminating into the ways of the 11-year-old psyche.
But he tends to make the same point repeatedly, and the redundancy adds up during
Tideland
's two-hour run time.
It's understandable that he wants some of the backstory to unfold slowly, but the effect would have been no less strong if he'd trimmed out some of the fat and gotten more quickly to the gooey center of things.
***image2***
It's also a bit of a shame that Bridges has to fade out so early in the film. He's got the perfect mix of
heroin-addled whimsy and leather-skinned horror. He does do a great job playing a corpse, but it was probably more fun for him to do the earlier scenes where he got to talk and move about and breathe and stuff.
Nonetheless, the acting is not diminished by his absence since Ferland could move mountains with her weird monologues, and the scenes where she talks to and voices the parts of her severed doll heads have a compelling weirdness.
Like those speeches,
Tideland
is worth seeing. It's the rare case of a film that understands what fairy tales were really about, and isn't afraid to put that level of horror and naïve eroticism on the screen. Perhaps most importantly, in spite of its flaws,
Tideland
shows a depth that Gilliam's earlier movies lacked. If he can now rein in his excesses, he might finally make the film that his talents have always promised.
