Review of Tideland (2005) by Al M — 02 Sep 2010

For starters, Tideland is not one of my favorite Gilliam Films, but is significantly outshines his previous film, The Brothers Grimm. Tideland is beautifully filmed and often magical piece of cinema that, as always with Gilliam films, blurs the lines between fantasy and reality. Tideland's problem is not its cringe-inducing subject matter but the fact that it simply goes on too long and fails to hold up past the hour and a half mark.

Tideland is filled with objectionable content. It is told through the eyes of a young girl named Jeliza Rose whose parents are both junkies. Jeliza is a good little daughter who even cooks up heroin and prepares it for her dad. When her mother overdoses, Jeliza and her father move to a family farmhouse where daddy proceeds to sit in a chair and never get up again while Jeliza roams the surrounding countryside where she meets a strange, morbid recluse of a woman and her happy-go-lucky, mentally handicapped brother. Initially, Jeliza's only friends are dolls who have been reduced to nothing but heads. However, Jeliza soon becomes best friends with the brother.

Tideland is a film about the innocence of childhood and the way that innocence views the world around it. Hence the film must be filled with awful stuff (Jeliza cooking heroin, Jeliza witnessing adults copulating, Jeliza misunderstanding the nature of a sexual relationship with a man, Jeliza not realizing that people are dead, etc.). Morbid, hilarious, stylish, and poignant, Tideland is an effective film but its games begin to wear a bit thin in the final quarter of the film.