Psycho's Movie Reviews #330: Tideland (2005)
- Mar 23, 2022
- 9 min read

Tideland is a 2005 fantasy film co-written and directed by Terry Gilliam. It is an adaptation of Mitch Cullin's novel of the same name. The film was shot in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, and the surrounding area in late 2004. The world premiere was at the 2005 Toronto International Film Festival where the film received a mixed response from both viewers and critics. After little interest from U.S. distributors, THINKFilm picked the film up for a U.S. release date in October 2006.
Plot
Tideland centres on an abandoned child, Jeliza-Rose, and her solitary adventures during one summer in rural Texas while staying at a rundown farmhouse called What Rocks, and focuses on the increasingly dark, imaginative fantasy life the girl creates with the aid of dismembered Barbie doll heads that she often wears on her fingertips. With names such as Mystique, Sateen Lips, Baby Blonde and Glitter Gal, the doll heads not only engage in long conversations with Jeliza-Rose, reflecting different aspects of the girl's psyche, but also act as her companions while she explores the barren Texas landscape.
After her mother overdoses on Methadone, Jeliza-Rose and her father, Noah, flee to Noah's mother's home, a remote Texas farmhouse. Before they leave, however, Noah fears that with all the drugs in their house he will lose Jeliza-Rose and be sent to prison, so he attempts to set it alight, although Jeliza-Rose manages to stop him. They find the farmhouse abandoned, but they settle in anyway. Their first night there, Noah dies from a heroin overdose. For much of the rest of the film, Noah's corpse remains seated upright in a living room chair with sunglasses covering his eyes. As her father slowly begins to decompose, Jeliza-Rose doesn't readily acknowledge his death because she has grown accustomed to him being unconscious for long periods at a time. Instead, she retreats deeper and deeper into her own mind, exploring the tall grass around the farmhouse, relying on her doll heads for friendship as an unconscious way of keeping herself from feeling too lonely and afraid.
During Jeliza-Rose's wanderings, she eventually encounters and befriends her neighbours, a mentally impaired young man called Dickens and his older sister Dell who is blind in one eye from a bee sting. At this point the story begins to unfold, revealing a past connection between Dell and Jeliza-Rose's deceased father. The eccentric neighbours take the girl under their wing, going so far as to preserve Noah's body via taxidermy (which Dell and Dickens did to their own dead mother). Amorous feelings, initiated mostly by the much younger Jeliza-Rose, begin to creep into the childlike relationship between her and Dickens, and it is revealed that the deeply troubled Dickens, a man-child who once drove a school bus in front of an oncoming train, keeps a stash of dynamite in his bedroom that he intends to use against the "Monster Shark" he believes is roaming the countryside. The Monster Shark is, in reality, the nightly passenger train that travels past the farmhouse where Jeliza-Rose and her dead father reside. It is also revealed that Dell and Noah were once "kissers", as Jeliza-Rose finds pictures of the two in the room Dell shares with her own taxidermized mother.
At the end of the film, following a violent confrontation between Dell, Dickens and Jeliza-Rose, a train wreck is caused by Dickens' dynamite, creating a scene of chaos near the farmhouse. Wandering about the wreckage, and among the confusion of injured travellers, Jeliza-Rose is discovered by a woman who survived, and she assumes the little girl is also a victim of the train wreck. The film ends with the woman embracing Jeliza-Rose, who stares with stunned confusion at the wreckage.

Release/Reception/Box Office
At Spain's 2005 San Sebastian Festival, Tideland was awarded the FIPRESCI Prize, selected by an international jury of critics who, in their award statement, said: "Our jury focused on the international competition and found Terry Gilliam's Tideland to be the best film of the selection—a decision which provoked controversial reactions." The jury consisted of Andrei Plakhov, Russia, President (Kommersant), Julio Feo Zarandieta, France (Radio France Internationale), Wolfgang Martin Hamdorf, Germany (Film-Dienst), Massimo Causo, Italy (Corriere Del Giorno), and Sergi Sanchez, Spain (La Razón).
In response to the controversy surrounding the film's FIPRESCI win at San Sebastian, jurist Sergi Sanchez wrote: "Gilliam's was the only one that dared to propose a risky and radical image, without any concessions, on a specific matter: madness as the only way of escaping in the face of a hostile environment. All this is endlessly coherent with the director's body of work, which has been frequently misunderstood by the critics, the industry, and audiences alike." Defending Gilliam's film while also placing it in the context of the director's previous works, as well as explaining the jury's decision, Sanchez concluded by stating, "Fighting against windmills is, after all, the same as fighting against the prejudices that trap creative freedom."
The subsequent mainstream reviews of Tideland were mixed, with Japan being the only country where it was both a critical and box office success. The film was first released in Russia (February 2006) followed by the Netherlands (March 2006) and Greece (May 2006). After almost a year without any US distribution, the film was picked up for American release by THINKFilm, and subsequently opened in the US, earning just $7,276 from one theatre during its first week run. The film's release was then expanded, but to only nine theatres, for a total domestic gross of $66,453. Since then, several independent cinemas and art museums have presented the film as a special event, including IFC Center and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.
Gilliam has openly criticized THINKFilm for the manner in which the company handled the American theatrical release of the film, and their unauthorized tampering with the aspect ratio of the film for its US DVD release. He has also gone on record as saying that nearly all his films have initially garnered mixed reactions from critics, and in at least one interview, as well as in the introduction to Tideland, he has stated that he believes many moviegoers will hate Tideland, others will love it, and some just won't know what to think about it. Gilliam has also said that Michael Palin, another former member of Monty Python, had told him that the film was either the best thing he had ever done, or the worst—although Palin himself couldn't quite decide either way.
Entertainment Weekly critic Owen Gleiberman gave Tideland an "F", calling it "gruesomely awful". In the subsequent review of the DVD release, Gleiberman's fellow Entertainment Weekly critic Clark Collis gave the film a "B" and stated: "Terry Gilliam's grim fairy tale is another fantastic(al) showcase for his visual talents."
The film received a "two thumbs way down" rating from Richard Roeper and guest critic A.O. Scott on the television show Ebert & Roeper. Scott said that toward the end, the film was "creepy, exploitive, and self-indulgent," a sentiment that was echoed in his New York Times review of the film. Like Scott, Roeper had a strong negative opinion, saying, "I hated this film," and "I came very close to walking out of the screening room. And I never do that." In the Chicago Reader, critic Jonathan Rosenbaum said the film was "hallucinatory and extremely unpleasant" and warned readers, "Enter this diseased Lewis Carroll universe at your own risk."
The Chicago Tribune critic Michael Wilmington, however, praised the film, further stating that "... it's crazy, dangerous and sometimes gorgeous...", and Harry Knowles of Ain't It Cool News wrote, "Tideland, for me, is a masterpiece", a blurb featured on the DVD release.
Filmmaker David Cronenberg described the film as a "poetic horror film", a quote which was used in the advertising campaign for the theatrical release. Filmmaker Rian Johnson named Tideland and The Fountain as his favorite films of 2006.
In the 16 July 2007 online edition of Independent Film Channel News, Michael Atkinson published a comparative film review of Harry Kümel's rarely seen Malpertuis (1971) and Tideland. Atkinson posits that a historical perspective has made Kümel's previously scorned film a more viable creation when far removed from the cultural context in which it was first released. He goes on to argue that Tideland could be the 21st century counterpart to Malpertuis, suggesting that Gilliam's film "is a snark-hunted freak just waiting for its historical moment, decades from now, when someone makes a case for it as a neglected masterpiece."
Box office $566,611

My Review
Walking out of the theatre with my friends having seen Tideland helped things, as we were able to talk about all the thoughts/emotions that we had regarding the movie. And what a film this is. We were all rather speechless, seeing a filmmaker at work at either his best, his worst, or both. Terry Gilliam's Tideland puts other mind-benders to shame. The film conjures up so much in the viewer, and it really is, when it all comes down to it, attempting chiefly to put the viewer (most likely an adult, it's quite worthy of it's R rating) into the viewpoint, intuition, imagination and needed escapism of a 9 year old girl. And quite the, uh, unique nine year old girl at that. Jeliza-Rose (Jodelle Ferland) lives a life that is surrounded, in the reality of it at least, by depravity, despair, and a kind of very weird, disturbing neglect. Her parents (Jeff Bridges and Jennifer Tilly) are both heroin addicts, the latter of which overdoses on methadone. In shock, the father takes Jeliza-Rose off to the farmhouse he grew up in. Jeliza soon settles in, very comfortably it seems, into a house that is near dilapidated, with her doll's heads as her best companions and critics and followers (and, of course, imaginative voices for herself), and finds a friend in Dickens (Brendan Fletcher), as the two of them share a strong, delirious connection.
Meanwhile, as Gilliam uses Bridges's character's fate practically as a plot device, he also does something with the flow and direction of the story (of what's there anyway) that reminded me a little of Gondry's the Science of Sleep. This is really all a very subjectively done movie, and if the viewer can get into that subjective realm of the central character where fantasy and reality become blurred and pretty much one in the same, then the main chord of the film is struck into. It's understandable too after leaving the film how some people (and some of those being the critics in the press) would hate the film so much. In fact, this may be the most polarizing movie Gilliam has ever made, and even I at times wondered if Gilliam could go too far with the material, and he sometimes steps onto that line of decency, even in the subversive tragic-comic/fantasy realm, a little much.
There is much to be disturbed from in this film, and it may rank up there with the most disturbing works of pure absurdism (or surrealism, take your pick) of the past decade. Take the fate of Noah; he has that chair he sits in (I will try not to reveal too much), and then after a while when this changes around, the effect this has on the audience is definitely a lot more horrific than it is for his daughter, who merely faints at one point (though quite a point). But this same terror that can come from seeing things in the innocent, naïve perspective of a child can also bring some interesting things too, and some of the more gruesome elements get mixed together with the other sweeter bits. There's one set of images that will stick with me for a while where the doll heads are performing some kind of 'experiment' inside of (I'm not kidding) Noah's insides. This visual imagination is expanded upon, even further than in past Gilliam films, which include a submersion in some kind of water as Jeliza swims about, a 'trip' down the rabbit hole, moments of talk with a squirrel, and the issue with that darn train, or rather 'shark'.
A lot of this seemingly would be so traumatic on a child, at least in terms of how being 'left alone' here is really not a joke exactly, and I often wondered how Gilliam directed Ferland through a lot of this. Maybe part of it was Ferland using her own imagination and, more crucially, innocence and always being truthful to that terminally dysfunctional but never boring state of mind she's in. Nothing is of the ordinary for her, and Ferland plays Jeliza-Rose in one of the best turns by a child actor I've seen in quite a while. Compared other characters- in fact maybe to everyone (particularly Dickens's Fletcher and Janet McTeer's Dell)- she's got all of her marbles together. But maybe not. Maybe her whole outlook is all based around being set inside this world where un-living things are very much alive. After a while, I understood all too well why a child would have to be in this outlook and state of mind- any sense of going past the abstractions would make things too horrible to contemplate.
So, would I recommend the movie, hmm...I still need to think about that, I think. I'm basically now still brooding over the images and themes and ideas and just the general tone of the picture. To say this about any Gilliam film might be moot, considering his track record, but Tideland is really nothing like any other film you've seen before. I was sometimes left in my seat saying 'oh my God', as well as getting very big and small laughs from how far Gilliam pushes things, even sometimes just with his camera via Nicola Pecorini's lens. He asks the viewer to try and take in the characters and the moods and sights and sounds and turns of events like a child who had no other portal of what's ordinary and regular and common to cling onto. From what's around Jeliza-Rose- death, addiction, decay, and nothingness to a degree- the more she has to latch into her own point of view. It's one of the most affecting films of the year, and at the least (I think after a first viewing) it won't leave you feeling indifferent. 9/10
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