Reviewed - Tideland: Despite its visual flair and a strong performance from the gifted young lead, Terry Gilliam's self-consciously weird fantasy tries the patience, writes Michael Dwyer
So the new Terry Gilliam movie is wildly self-indulgent and self-consciously weird. But then, what else should we expect after a dozen movies directed by the Monty Python alumnus?
Tideland may seem relatively restrained, but only when compared with Gilliam's previous picture, the exhaustingly wacky The Brothers Grimm. Gilliam follows that yarn about fairytale writers with what he describes as "Alice in Wonderland meets Psycho". The Alice surrogate is a 10-year-old girl, Jeliza-Rose (Jodelle Ferland), who, quite understandably, has created a fantasy world as a diversion from the realities of living with her strung-out junkie parents. As the only member of the family with any sense of responsibility, she is, as she has to be, resourceful. Her father, Noah (Jeff Bridges), is a faded rock star; in Mitch Cullin's 2000 novel, on which the movie is based, the character was based on guitarist Link Wray. His unstable wife is known as Queen Gunhilda and played with sledgehammer subtlety by Jennifer Tilly.
Noah dreams of some day taking them to Jutland and meeting the Bog People, but when he talks about "going on vacation", he is referring to his next fix. A startling early sequence shows his young daughter preparing Noah's heroin and injecting him with it.
Having consumed vast quantities of drugs, both parents die early on in the movie, leaving Jeliza-Rose to survive on her own at her grandmother's isolated, derelict farmhouse in a Texas cornfield. She talks to rabbits and squirrels, and converses with the heads of her four dolls, providing all their voices.
She finds human company in a neighbour, Dickens (Brendan Fletcher) - a mentally damaged young man with a lobotomy scar and an obsession with finding a monster shark in their rural milieu - and his intimidating, one-eyed sister (Janet McTeer), who dresses in black and a beekeeper's mesh hood.
Gilliam's visual flair sustains his lugubrious movie to a certain extent, achieving a striking American Gothic look inspired by Andrew Wyeth's painting, Christina's World. Clearly a gifted young actor, young Ferland has terrific screen presence, but that alone cannot carry such a patience-stretching film.
One of the US's finest actors, Bridges is wasted in more ways than one in Tideland, and in Gilliam's explicit reference to Psycho, Noah spends most of the movie as a corpse, surrounded by flies and wearing his mother's wig.
