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Tideland
There is no other possible way to describe Tideland other than to say it's a movie formed entirely on the foundation of a young child's innocence. Jeliza-Rose is your seemingly ordinary child of around 8 who merely has a very vivid, active imagination. The opening scenes are of her in an overturned bus, talking to fireflies as a train rumbles past. Before too long, we are introduced to the causes of detachment from the outside world. Her father, often high on heroin that Jeliza cooks up in a spoon, tells Jeliza-Rose of a magical place called Jutland. A place he is going to take them both to get away from his wife, the evil Queen Gunhilda, Jeliza's drugged-out, overweight mother. The critics who claimed Jennifer Tilly was unrecognizable were obviously not watching the same movie I was or perhaps I just had a better copy. Her face is quite distinctive and her voice is the stuff of many nightmares. The real fun begins when Gunhilda keels over from an ill-mixed methadone cocktail. Because he himself is always completely out of it, he and Jeliza freak out and head to the house he grew up in, somewhere in the middle of Texas.
Jeliza-Rose has a wicked Southern accent, one like none other I have heard before. As if that were not bad enough, she also has different voices for her "friends", four named doll heads (Mystique, Baby Blonde, Glitter Gal, and Sateen Lips). They are all voiced by Jeliza and are her main source of criticism, yet are also her strength when in an uncomfortable setting. When Jeliza's father dies, you begin to wonder if Jeliza's just going to hole up in that house with the corpse, especially because we haven't really met any other characters, other than the random person on the bus. After getting impatient with her father's lack of physical affection, Jeliza wanders outside into the fields and dirt to play. Here we meet Dell, who is completely dressed in a bee-hive suit, making sure to show her dead, milky eye to the staring Jeliza. The more Jeliza talks to Dell, the more we realize that Dell is also off her rocker. No, I mean completely. The bitch is crazy. Some time later, we meet Dell's simple brother Dickens, who lives in his own world. Sometimes the worlds of Jeliza and Dickens collide and we're faced with some rather uncomfortable moments between two characters who probably have no idea how icky some things are, especially with Dickens being quite a bit older than Jeliza-Rose.
As Dickens and Jeliza get close, Dell has somewhat taken Jeliza under her wing. She finds out that Dell was once her father's lover, quite a long time ago, and that Dell still held a torch for him. So upon finding him dead in his chair, Dell sets out to taxidermy him so she may be with him forever. Jeliza is too busy trying to kill the monster shark to realize anything funny between Dell and her father. Jeliza does her best to fit in with the family, but because of her curiosity, she's often sent running, confused and scared. An unfortunate incident with Dell's mother breaks the final straw and Jeliza heads home to find comfort in her father.
If you just take this as a movie about a crazy child, it will still be interesting, but it sure as hell won't be as whimsical as I thought it was. The movie relies heavily on Alice in Wonderland imagery, but the characters are so well thought out that they stand brilliantly on their own. The locations are gorgeous in their own right, barren and foreboding. You wonder how anything can thrive out there, but at the end of the film, you realize Jeliza's world did not look like the one we most often saw. Our fields of wheat and grass, to her were oceans of seaweed. A pile of junk covered with blankets, to her and Dickens was his prized submarine. I think it keeps them eerily disconnected to the actual world surrounding them, but I think we'd all like that ability every know and then. The ending of this movie was a little expected, as I don't think they could get away with just letting the girl stay in such an environment and expect us to believe she'll be alright. The woman who takes Jeliza under her wing at the end is a stark contrast to the world Jeliza had been previously living in. It makes one wonder, will Jeliza soon become grounded in reality or will the woman be brought into Jeliza's world of near-insanity.
This movie is about a child's innocence with its magical glory, but it does take chances and show the uncomfortable side of not being deeply-seated in the "real world". I almost wrote this off because of Jodelle Ferland (Jeliza Rose) and her accents and then again when I realized the movie is pretty much just her on the screen 90 percent of the time. Even my dislike of Jeff Bridges and Jennifer Tilly could not dissuade me from thinking the entire cast was wonderful. If anyone can play a drugged-out hippy, it's Jeff Bridges. The same can be said for Jennifer Tilly's stoned, harpy character. Despite the uncomfortableness, I am glad I stuck it out, Tideland is a fantastic, surreal movie. And if you don't mind actually using your brain and your imagination, this movie is a perfect pick.
3.5 / 4.0
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