Any film that starts out with a defensive disclaimer from the director explaining to the viewer how the film "should" be viewed is immediately suspect to me. It implies that what I am about to see wasn't done right and the director needs to do a lot of backtracking to make it seem like the whole thing was on purpose.
And that is exactly how "Tideland" unfolded.
Though sold as "bold" cinema for those who aren't happy to be placated by Hollywood junk, "Tideland" is nothing of the sort. It's a pretentious folly - it tries so hard to shock that it comes off like an old John Waters film without the youthful snickering and it seems to think that if you wrap it all in very forced allusions to "Alice in Wonderland," you've got yourself some art.
The first problem with the film is Gilliam's assertion that it is a testament to the resilience of children. The ending implies that adversity is bludgeoned from the soul with the right amount of imagination, but the whole film is populated with horrible adults who were not resilient children in the slightest - they are damaged, broken people lashing out. There is no resilience on display anywhere - and even the ending doesn't reveal resilience so much as dumb luck.
Furthermore, Gilliam's proposition is an either/or one, a simplistic proclamation of a complicated circumstance. Surviving does not mean wholeness, as Gilliam's rose-colored glasses ending implies. There are degrees upon degrees of subtle trauma that such survival entails - surely the topic deserves more than his standard theme of people retreating into their imagination in order to survive in the world they find themselves. It's the same story for every movie the man has made and it feels incredibly tacked on in this one.
The second problem is that Gillliam populates the film with cartoon characters that don't elicit any real sympathy or horror. I understand that he is trying to do the fairy tale schtick, but it doesn't work because the moral he is pushing is so flawed that it needs nuance more than archetypes to address the real thematic concerns that can come out of this story. Jeff Bridges and Jennifer Tilly aren't particularly menacing, they're just goofy. They seem like Hollywood actors pretending to be camped-up degenerates. They are like something out of the Batman TV show.
The third problem is the lead actress, who just hasn't got what it takes to carry a whole film, particularly one that spends A LOT of time with just her talking to herself. She seems so directed, so controlled by what Gilliam wants her to do, that there is nothing natural in her performance at all - she is more like Gilliam's idea of what a child acts like rather than a real person - and the portrayal of this character is so grating between the actress' limitations and Gilliam's inept conception of her that she brings no sympathy to a character who should demand much.
The fourth problem is that it is long and boring. A good half hour needs to be cut out just to stop the meandering. The supposed shocking nature of the film comes off as the desperate attempt of an old director to prove he still has his edge - it's not jarring so much a coma-inducing. And that's the saddest part. For all the implications of the disclaimer at the end, it actually doesn't deliver in its promised provocation and it becomes obvious that it just never occurred to Gilliam that the reason some people didn't like it isn't because it's scandalous or because they don't understand what he was trying to do, but because he just didn't do it very well at any stage of the production.
I respect him for trying something different, but the nature of an experiment is that the chance exists that it might fail and anyone with any real grip on the creative journey needs to accept that and be able to examine what went wrong, rather than be defensive about it.
And that is exactly how "Tideland" unfolded.
Though sold as "bold" cinema for those who aren't happy to be placated by Hollywood junk, "Tideland" is nothing of the sort. It's a pretentious folly - it tries so hard to shock that it comes off like an old John Waters film without the youthful snickering and it seems to think that if you wrap it all in very forced allusions to "Alice in Wonderland," you've got yourself some art.
The first problem with the film is Gilliam's assertion that it is a testament to the resilience of children. The ending implies that adversity is bludgeoned from the soul with the right amount of imagination, but the whole film is populated with horrible adults who were not resilient children in the slightest - they are damaged, broken people lashing out. There is no resilience on display anywhere - and even the ending doesn't reveal resilience so much as dumb luck.
Furthermore, Gilliam's proposition is an either/or one, a simplistic proclamation of a complicated circumstance. Surviving does not mean wholeness, as Gilliam's rose-colored glasses ending implies. There are degrees upon degrees of subtle trauma that such survival entails - surely the topic deserves more than his standard theme of people retreating into their imagination in order to survive in the world they find themselves. It's the same story for every movie the man has made and it feels incredibly tacked on in this one.
The second problem is that Gillliam populates the film with cartoon characters that don't elicit any real sympathy or horror. I understand that he is trying to do the fairy tale schtick, but it doesn't work because the moral he is pushing is so flawed that it needs nuance more than archetypes to address the real thematic concerns that can come out of this story. Jeff Bridges and Jennifer Tilly aren't particularly menacing, they're just goofy. They seem like Hollywood actors pretending to be camped-up degenerates. They are like something out of the Batman TV show.
The third problem is the lead actress, who just hasn't got what it takes to carry a whole film, particularly one that spends A LOT of time with just her talking to herself. She seems so directed, so controlled by what Gilliam wants her to do, that there is nothing natural in her performance at all - she is more like Gilliam's idea of what a child acts like rather than a real person - and the portrayal of this character is so grating between the actress' limitations and Gilliam's inept conception of her that she brings no sympathy to a character who should demand much.
The fourth problem is that it is long and boring. A good half hour needs to be cut out just to stop the meandering. The supposed shocking nature of the film comes off as the desperate attempt of an old director to prove he still has his edge - it's not jarring so much a coma-inducing. And that's the saddest part. For all the implications of the disclaimer at the end, it actually doesn't deliver in its promised provocation and it becomes obvious that it just never occurred to Gilliam that the reason some people didn't like it isn't because it's scandalous or because they don't understand what he was trying to do, but because he just didn't do it very well at any stage of the production.
I respect him for trying something different, but the nature of an experiment is that the chance exists that it might fail and anyone with any real grip on the creative journey needs to accept that and be able to examine what went wrong, rather than be defensive about it.