Review of Tideland (2005) by Anatoly S — 12 Jun 2010

True, this movie has a slow pace, a surreal sensibility, and ignores numerous social mores. It deals with subtle and strange things, and it deals with them in subtle and strange ways. It is truly a work of art and not in any sense a product designed to be marketable to some demographic.

I can't help but feel that so many people hated it because they simply lacked the attention span for it. Put another way, I think a lot of people didn't like it for the same reason that a lot of people don't like Thomas Pynchon's novels, which also weave the real and the surreal together, and dive beneath much of what society determines to be normal and moral.

It is, after all, a movie with a strongly literary quality to it... it deals, fundamentally, with the inner life; the inner life and the subconscious. These aspects of human consciousness exist, like children, in a kind of pre- or sub-moral realm, where the determining factors between goodness and badness are not part of an organized system of behavioral rules that decry things like drug abuse, but rather, the determining factors between goodness and badness are instinct, emotion, aesthetics, and imagination.

Say what you will, that realm--the realm of dreams, and of daydreaming children--is real, and I think Gilliam's attempt to portray some little piece of that realm in film results in something wonderful.