Terry Gilliam’s Fields of Insanity
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Having endured polarized critical reception at the 2005 Toronto Film Festival and nearly a year in distribution limbo, Terry Gilliam’s “Tideland” arrives today at the IFC Center. Relatively low-budget and intimate (certainly in comparison to last year’s “The Brothers Grimm”), Mr. Gilliam’s new film has been billed as a departure from the director’s oddball blockbusters. Mr. Gilliam has somewhat facetiously described “Tideland,” adapted from novelist Mitch Cullin’s much admired modern gothic fantasia, as “Alice in Wonderland” meets “Psycho.” True, “Tideland” quotes liberally and literally from Lewis Caroll’s “Alice” and, like “Psycho,” it contains an ominous house and human taxidermy. But the truth is that “Tideland” resembles nothing so much as it does Mr. Gilliam’s previous pictures.
Like “Time Bandits” and “Baron Munchausen,” the film details a transformative journey undertaken by a neglected child. And like “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” that journey begins with chemical excess. Both of young Jeliza-Rose’s (Jodelle Ferland) parents, Noah (Jeff Bridges) and Queen Gunhilda (Jennifer Tilly in the single shrillest caricature of motherhood in Mr. Gilliam’s career-long gallery of hell-moms), are junkies. Jeliza-Rose dutifully cooks up her folks’ dope with the same methodical innocence with which the upper-middle-class kids in “The Ice Storm” mixed their parents’ gin and tonics.
When mom dies of an overdose, dad panics, grabs Jeliza-Rose, and heads back home to his family’s house, a white clapboard rock amid amber waves of heartland grain. But Noah’s mother is long dead, and his birthplace is a vandalized pigsty on the inside. Unable to cope with yet another loss, Noah, with his daughter’s help, ties off, shoots up, and checks out, leaving Jeliza-Rose on her own in an environment no less hostile, though considerably more picturesque, than the one she has just escaped.
Jeliza-Rose explores her new world while continuing an ongoing make-believe relationship with a series of doll heads, one of which is a ringer for the sinister baby-dolls that fettered the winged Jonathan Pryce in “Brazil.” Reality, of a kind, intrudes in the form of Dell (Janet McTeer), a harsh rural eccentric, and Dickens (Brendan Fletcher), Dell’s damaged, epileptic brother. Dickens has retreated into his own fantasy world, one in which he is a submarine Captain Ahab in search of a giant killer shark that roars down the railroad tracks bisecting the prairie sea. Lonesome, needy, and as forgiving of Dickens’s infirmities as she was of her parents’ weaknesses, Jeliza-Rose falls in love with him.
Whether in one of the voices of her dollhead friends or in her own, Jeliza-Rose almost never stops speaking. In the book “Tideland,” Jeliza-Rose’s stream of kid-consciousness first-person narration is a language all its own. Her imaginary conversations and fourfold character ruminations help her to quantify and survive the otherwise un-nameably horrific. But, foregrounded in Mr. Gilliam’s movie, Jeliza-Rose’s incessant natter is about as illuminating a subway train packed with pint-sized acting hopefuls en route to a cattle call audition for a roadshow “Annie.”
For a filmmaker whose reputation is based on his visual gifts, Mr. Gilliam sure isn’t inclined to let the picture tell the story. He may be the noisiest fantasist going. His films are full of chattering background characters, kabongs, and shrieks. “Tideland” is no exception. In the rare moments when the talking stops, the soundtrack weighs in. The film’s wall-to-wall score thunders in Bruckheimer-like crescendos then fades into those wind chime tinkles and woodwind tootlings that herald magic in Chris Columbus movies.
Mr. Gilliam trusts his cast to smuggle something human and honest into his noisy, brightly colored, and distorted wide-screen cartoon view of the world. In the case of Johnny Depp in “Fear and Loathing,” that trust was rewarded. Jodelle Ferland, a self-assured and brighteyed kid actor in the Dakota Fanning mold, is another matter. If there’s such a thing as a pluckiness allergy, you may wish to have yourself tested before viewing “Tideland.” Ms. Ferland offers few reactions that aren’t accompanied by a wide-eyed gasp, scream, whine, or barrage of dialogue. At times during the film’s two-hour span, I caught myself wishing Jeliza-Rose had tagged along on mom’s journey instead of dad’s.
“Tideland” showcases all manner of taboos and grotesqueries. Heroin squirts and blood spurts. People have seizures and die. Bodies rot, farting out postmortem gases, before getting gutted, stuffed, embalmed, and embraced. Calling out a movie for being gross is a slippery critical slope. Fans of Gaspar Noé’s unrelentingly sophomoric “Irreversible” dismiss Noé’s naysayers as lacking the courage to confront the harsh reality that, in their eyes,”Irreversible” bravely depicts. Admirers of “Tideland” will likely make a similar claim for its director’s harsh nonreality.
Mr. Gilliam photographs looming, bulging faces with the same relish that Tim Burton lovingly frames his characteristic cheerful wide-eyed innocents. But frankly, both filmmakers’ acts have pretty much worn through by this point. Whether in fisheye-lens close-up or in crooked department store window tableaux, the frivolous atrocities of “Tideland” are performed with the same bug-eyed and Muppet-like twitches, mugs, and shrugs that Mr. Gilliam mastered in his Monty Python days.
Dark, light, or somewhere in between, fantasy, especially the childlike kind, requires verisimilitude. A film like “Tideland” needs some real and recognizable morsel of story logic or behavior for audience and characters to share. But the grounding reality of “Tideland” is one in which you can smoke on a public bus. The people populating the film pound away on their single character note until either they die or the credits roll.The sole controlling creative impulse on display appears to be a desire to swiftly move into the next deep focus busy-bee set piece in which Jeliza-Rose and company frantically make something sentimental out of something disgusting or vice versa.
If there’s anything challenging or unusual about “Tideland,” it’s the film’s disturbingly frank depiction of a burgeoning physical relationship between Jeliza-Rose and Dickens. No blue-tongued corpse, stuffed grandmother, or frothing junkie can hold a creepiness candle to a grown man, albeit one with a child’s mind, inches away from French kissing a 10-year-old girl. Of all of grim self-conscious details, that one is the grimmest.
There is at the core of “Tideland” the emptiness of the bungled book adaptation. This movie is a valentine, not a reimagining, and whatever epiphanies Mr. Cullin’s work held for the film’s creators remain on the page. “If it were all in the script, why make the film,” Nick Ray once quipped. We live in an age when novels are as influenced by filmic expression as they are by literary traditions. For Mr. Gilliam and an increasing number of filmmakers optioning and adapting contemporary fiction, the question may be, “If it’s all in the book, why write the script in the first place?”