STANDING ON THE BEACH
Review by K. A. Laity
Tideland
Dir.Terry Gilliam
2005, 122 Minutes
novel by Mitch Cullin
If there was any justice in the world (and there’s not), Jodelle Ferland would have been honored with all manner of accolades for her portrayal of Jeliza-Rose in Terry Gilliam’s latest film, TIDELAND. She would have received an Academy Award for her portrayal if they do indeed reflect the very finest achievement in acting (clearly, they do not). Instead, the film was buried and her stunning accomplishment only quietly released on DVD this month. Even the packaging tries to keep you away. It’s rated R for “bizarre and disturbing content, including drug use, sexuality, and gruesome situations—all involving a child, and for some language.”
All true, by the way; at first I thought this was going to make a good double feature with Pan’s Labyrinth, which stars another superb child actor, Ivana Baquero, and tells the story of a little girl using fantasy and imagination to cope with real life horror. But this film is much more harrowing and truly disturbing in a Dancer in the Dark, Baise-Moi or Man Bites Dog kind of way. It’s telling that Jeliza-Rose’s father is obsessed with the Jutland peninsula of Denmark and its gruesome artifacts, the bog people, whose remains have been preserved intact for centuries. Death, destruction and decay haunt this child’s story.
None of which should discourage you from seeing this mesmerizing film. Even Gilliam’s own disclaimer that precedes the film focuses on preparing viewers for the harrowing journey, though he reveals with wonder his revelation that at the age of 64, “I finally discovered the child within me, it turned out to be a little girl.” He looks haggard and speaks as if secreted in an underground bunker, a gun pointed at his chest as he reads from cue cards. One can’t help wondering whether Universal finally captured the rebel filmmaker and consigned him to a Brazilian torture chamber of their own devising (including requisite reams of paperwork). “If it’s shocking,” he tells us patiently, “It’s because it is innocent.” We need to forget everything we have learned as adults and become children once more. While this is often suggested to us by various moviemakers in a mood of Spielbergian nostalgia and sentimentality, Gilliam wants us to have truly open minds that deal with surprise like children (rather than simply with the horror of adults).
Tideland images ©Think Films.
An admirable aim (and easy enough for some of us who never quite got the hang of being adults), but not one that guarantees an easier trip through this passage. The start of the film, with its explicit appeal to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and the mundane hell of drug-addicted life, in no way prepares us for the narrative of horror, loss and bizarre resilience. The latter is Gilliam’s chief point about children who, when dropped, he argues, tend to bounce. Jeliza-Rose gets dropped a lot. Within minutes of the opening we see her helping her Jutland-obsessed daddy (the always reliable Jeff Bridges) shoot up, then helping to get the circulation going in the legs of her screechy, methadone-enhanced mommy (an almost unrecognizable Jennifer Tilly), before the unsurprising death of the same leads to her father’s decision to take his daughter to grandma’s house. Things there go from bad to worse—all of which Jeliza-Rose has to cope with mostly on her own, aided by her imagination and her collection of doll-heads, itself a wonderful motif that instantly conveys the “let’s play” aspect of childhood, but also the terrible damage life has already handed this child. The well-loved and well-worn (and melted and damaged) heads offer the voices of her tiny experience, expressing her fears and her attempts to say what she thinks an adult would advise.
So surreal is the reality—and so realistic the fantasy—that we’re not quite sure if the neighbors Dell (Janet McTeer) and Dickens (Brendan Fletcher) are real or imagined. The two provide additionally loopy characters that in any other context might come across as over-the-top but here fit, largely because Jeliza-Rose takes them in stride without a second thought, updating her worldview to hold theirs. The presence of adults at first lends hope that the girl will have someone to turn to in the midst of the horrors, but we quickly find that these two are as deeply damaged as any of the other adults Jeliza-Rose has known. The brother and sister underscore the theme of loss and the peculiar sources of resilience that can be found when one really needs to survive. It’s like a new law of physics devised by Gilliam: every devastation has an equal and opposite (and desperately imaginative) act of retention.
Child actors walk a very fine line—too often the smarmy Hollywood spawn regurgitate all manner of cuteness and knowingness and make you want to spew every morsel you’re ever swallowed, or else they simply look sweet while serving as blank canvases that require viewers to impose upon their cheerful cheeks and pouty lips all the emotions which they have had no experience in conveying. Jodelle Ferland accomplishes more than most adult actors without the strutting, shouting or Camilla-like death scenes favored by adult actors in what passes for acting these days (death to Julia Roberts! and to Edward Norton for that matter, too). Gilliam has accomplished much in this fearless film that needs only a fearless audience. That might be hard to come by.
N.B. the DVD comes with a second disc with a film, Getting Gilliam, by Vincenzo Natali which also includes a commentary by both directors; a making of doco; deleted scenes with commentary; green screen filming, interviews and the trailer.
