Terry Gilliam's 'Tideland' Due This Fall
The always suprising Terry Gilliam talks to The Guardian about his movie TIDELAND, which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival last year. (It'll finally get a small release in the US on Oct. 6th.)
Even in notably nice Toronto, this was one of the most walked out upon screenings I've ever steeled myself to sit through. I'm a huge fan of Gilliam's movies, but this was an ordeal -- like watching the brain-eating scene in HANNIBAL over and over again: Nasty, nauseating.
It got to the point where I had to stay, in order to count the number of people who walked out. Then I realized it would be easier to count those who butched it out to the end. From a full house down to about 20. Mitch Dell's Texas Grotesque novel (a sort of 'shroomy (shroomier?), uglier WIZARD OF OZ has extensive scenes of, well, grotesquerie, but there's a big difference between description and literal depiction.
At the time, most critics thought the film was unreleasable for a number of reasons: Some were freaked out by the Gothic/Grotesque details of a little girl - the 10 year old heroine, Jeliza Rose, cooking dope for her addict dad (Jeff Bridges) so he could shoot up. That didn't bother me. And it wasn't the scene where she behaved seductively with a mentally retarded man, all but forcing him to kiss her. In a way, both scenes showed how adaptable - and then cruelly manipulative - an abused child could become in order to survive.
No, what got to me was the extended close ups of a putrefying corpse (Jeff Bridges) and the on-screen dissection of his long dead body. Like, an hour's worth of putrefaction. You could practically smell it.
But the characters in the film didn't react. Of course, they were all demented or in shock, so their emotional reactions were shut down or warped. But even mad people have visceral and sense-reactions. There's something false and gutless in all this displayed, demonstrative craziness.
Though it was upsetting to imagine a child in the thick of this weirdness, I'm convinced it was far less weird for the child actress (Jodelle Ferland, who's gone on to work on 24 and SILENT HILL) to peform the scenes than it is for an audience to watch. For a kid, this is playtime. Don't worry about her: she's turned up since TIDELAND in '24' and SILENT HILL.
Comments
I was at the Toronto fest last year and although I didn't see Tideland, I talked to people who had seen it and I remember them saying it was a really good film, if uncomfortable to sit through at times. Of course, these were people I was chatting with while standing in line for other films, so I can't vouch for their taste.
Posted by: Josh Boelter | August 12, 2006 09:09 PM
Maybe they were more prepared than I was. Until the putrefaction set in...well, I wasn't exactly enjoying the film, but I knew I was seeing something extraordinary. But my visceral reaction became stronger than any intellectual one. It made me ill.
The Guardian's film section had a note about a new introduction to the film, by Gilliam himself. Maybe that will make a difference.
What did you think of THE BROTHERS GRIMM?
Posted by: Justine_FilmFatale | August 16, 2006 04:39 PM