Tideland – (2005, based on Mitch Cullin’s novel) Terry Gilliam directs us through a macabre maze of people and events that under ordinary circumstances would be scarily disorienting for anyone, let alone a little girl left alone, but not as seen through the eyes of Jeliza-Rose (Jodella Ferland), Gilliam’s alter ego. Similar in some respects to Pan’s Labyrinth in that both involve a pre-adolescent child having to deal with a terrible reality by making up a world of fantasy (Jeliza-Rose engages in conversations with the heads of her four dolls on her fingers in lieu of real friends), this film suggests a Southern-gothic version of The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland (which Jeliza-Rose reads to her father while sitting in his lap as he’s “on vacation”) as if written by William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams but set in the American prairie.

At the beginning of our story Jeliza-Rose lives with her heroin-addicted father Noah (Jeff Bridges) and mother Queen Gunhilda (Jennifer Tilly), helping prepare her dad’s injections. After her mother dies of an overdose of methadone and chocolates, father and daughter take a bus and hitchhike to Dad’s abandoned childhood home on the prairie. While Dad goes on a permanent vacation, sitting up in a rocking chair, Jeliza-Rose takes all in stride, meeting the neighbors: the black witch Dell (Janet McTeer), who practices taxidermy on the local fauna, and her mentally retarded/epileptic brother Dickens (Brendan Fletcher), who shows her his submarine, the tracks of the monster shark, and his secret weapon. Dell practices her art on Noah, whom she knew fondly when they were children, giving him more permanence than A Rose for Emily.

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Copyright © 2007 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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