I don't know what to think of it. Beautiful? Yes, Creative? Of course. Disturbing? You bet. Funny? Hysterically. What could be funnier that Jeff Bridgess playing aged Dude - dad to the extreme, part II - "Duddy takes vacation to the point of no return"? Or Jennifer Tilly as a caricature of Courtney Love? Unpleasant? Very much so. Original? The director himself called his movie, "Alice in Wonderland meets Psycho" and these are just two references of many. You can name all novels, short stories or the movies about the little girls escaping their dreadful realities in the world of their imagination as well as "Wizard of Oz", Tennessee Williams' plays, Roman Polanski's "Repulsion" and one of the most stunning screen adaptations of "Alice in Wonderland", Jan Svankmajer's "Alice". Gilliam in "Tideland" borrows from them or rather meditates on the same themes, using his unique tools, and bringing his unique vision and talent in the familiar harrowing story of a child lost.
The movie is technically superb and visually arresting - it must be. If anything, Terry Gilliam is known as one of the most talented and wildly imaginative modern filmmakers, the true eccentric. He describes himself better than anyone ever would:
"There's a side of me that always fell for manic things, frenzied, cartoony performances. I always liked sideshows, freakshows. ...Absolutely grotesque, awful, tasteless. I like things to be tasteless."
I guess, whether you'd like "Tideland" or not, would depend a lot on your sharing his fondness for the things "absolutely grotesque, awful, tasteless" - there are plenty of them in "Tideland" yet strangely it is tender and sad, and in its best moments undeniably brilliant. Often called modern fairy tale for adults, the movie fits perfectly the description. Fairy tales, the unabridged versions of them are often scary, graphic, disturbing, violent, bloody, gory...and fascinating. Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Anderson - his "Little Mermaid" is one of the saddest, even tragic tales ever written. Oscar Wilde's fairy tales, "Arabian Nights" - the real thing, not the adaptations for the children; myths and legends of ancient Greece - the myth of two brothers, Atreus and Thyestes, the story of Oedipus - that's pure horror and tragedy. Well, back to the Gilliam's fairy tale. Did I like it? I don't know. What I do know that the very last shot of the movie, the one which supposed to symbolize the happy ending, that of the girl's face from the angle that distorts her features turning the angelic face into the sinister cynical mask that could belong to the creature of the darkest nightmares and with two huge black holes of eyes is the most horrifying one in the movie which is packed with the scenes of horror. None of them is as disturbing, unsettling and memorable as this face - happy end according Terry Gilliam.
