Richard Roeper and A. O. Scott got together (sans Roger Ebert) to hate Terry Gilliam's new film Tideland. This once again proves what a couple of boneheads they are. Roeper said there was "no real fairy tale" element in the movie. "Real fairy tale"? Does he mean it doesn't contain the Disneyfied version of fairy tale-telling that somehow supplanted the older tradition of grotesque fairy tales in our culturally malnourished civilization? In that case, he's right. Tideland isn't Disney's version of Alice in Wonderland; it's Gilliam's.
A real fairy tale is cold and cutting and factual as death. And that is why fairy tales are beautiful--because they're honest in a way stories aiming at realism somehow cannot be. This is what Gilliam gets right, and why the film is worth seeing. It is also unpredictable, which goes far with me. No guns, no car chases (although there are explosions), and a resolution hard to foresee and yet mythically satisfying. I would pay to see any recent film that pulls off all of that.
Gilliam gets, I think, some things wrong, too, but the movie is certainly good enough for me to recommend it. He flirts with some cliched characters and ideas, the brain-damaged man-child for example, but in the end I think he pulls them off satisfactorily.
I think Tideland is unsafe in a way general audiences could not help but hate; people who have a particular fancy of what a little girl is like will most likely fear it—and therefore hate it—the most. I think the success of Little Miss Sunshine's protagonist could be instructively contrasted with the nearly uniform critical attack on the protagonist in this film; it might help us diagnose our cultural inability to see and understand children (which is why we crank out so many damaged ones).
This isn't Terry Gilliam's best film, but, thank god, neither is it The Brothers Grimm. Grimm was a look at fairy tales and folklore designed to make money, where Tideland is simply art.
See it. My only suggestion is NOT to listen to Gilliam's introduction, which is just a publicity stunt and quite misleading about the nature of the film. I suspect he's joking when he says the little girl is "innocent"—playing on the empty, self-deluding definition we tend to assign to the concept of innocence. Something far more interesting is going on here than edenic childhood bullshit, and I think critics are pissed because they wanted edenic childhood bullshit with a smattering of trendy dysfunction (viz Little Miss Sunshine). This is not neo-Indie Hollywood-approved dysfunction, it's sordid desperation—including such unusual subjects as mummification, necrophilia, incest, child abuse, and sociopathic mass murder.
Elsewhere, I heard Gilliam dryly say, "Children are resilient. Drop them and they bounce." The comment gets to the heart of the film: we're watching a little girl get dropped and seeing how she bounces when she hits the ground. Unpalatable, sure, but good fiction and a good film.
6 comments:
I'd agree with most of what you've written here, though I'm not sure Gilliam's introduction is ironic. I think he's a Boomer dad that is a little too fascinated with the world of play that children create, which in real life can be quite boring. So we look at the world through here point of view--and Gilliam hasn't excised the darkness from the innocence, thankfully--but we are always aware of this. I kept thinking, "When is she going to come to terms with her dad's death?" or "When she grows up she's going to have to deal with this trauma--'bounce back' as it were." So because there was this continuous strand of dramatic irony, I felt not seduced by her world so much as painfully aware that I was an adult. I hear that Pans-Labyrinth gets this right: the worlds of the adult and the child blur sometimes so that you aren't sure where you are. I was always sure of where I was in Tideland.
In terms of the symbols, yes, they're subtle and complex--he did excellent work, esp with the bog man references and gallows humor. I think the "ghost lady" could have been developed. I felt ripped off when her story was dropped and the brother got most of the screen time instead. This was the period of the movie when it slowed down too much for me. However, then the hilarious Rose for Emily scene ensued! Stitches.
As for the fairy tale question, I'm glad Gilliam is sticking to the grotesque. I think Angela Carter is out best comparison. Jordan's "A Company of Wolves" brought her take on Litte Red Riding Hood together with her novel The Magic Toyshop, which takes all those orphans from Grimm and Goose and imagines them stuck in a house whose "adults" hate their lost innocence enough to exploit and destroy it.
My major reaction to this movie was "meh," loosely traslated as "so what?" Perhaps I've been thoroughly spoiled by seeing Pan's Labyrinth, which does a lot of what this film attempts, but in a much more politically sophisicated way. Sometimes film viewing really just comes down to whether or not the film moves you, whether you find room within it for your own understanding of the world, whether you LIKE it. And I didn't really like this film, mostly because it trembled on the edge of so much potential that it ended up ignoring.
I really do have to agree with Ben that this film is not about looking through the eyes of a child. The pathos of the film actually relies on the viewer "knowing otherwise," and this is cemented by the final (and what I thought was the most interesting) moment of the film--when the girl realizes that the silhouetted figure is not her "captain," but a man wailing in agony. The irksome thing about this film, to me, was how it depended so completely on dramatic irony for its pathos, and yet totally dropped the ball in terms of politics. I guess that what I mean to say is that I was told to feel something for these characters, without being told why. Of course, the pathos isn't as exploitative as it is in films such as "Kids" or "Gummo"--but, and I hate to say this--I do think that those films are arguably more politically responsible. I feel that "Tideland" is an example of what happens when people use solipsism as an excuse to create "art for art's sake." Does anyone else see Gilliam claiming that this story--the story of an impoverished and abused little girl--is HIS story, that her eyes are literally his eyes, and that children are resilient and "bounce," as politically problematic? Never mind the atrocious representation of the working-class as a bunch of monstrous freaks, without the necessary concomitant critique of the systems (capitalism, privatization, Christianity) that have produced them as such.
Hm.
Read Charles Dickens if you want your working class grotesques frontloaded with the "necessary concomitant critiques" of "capitalism, privatization, Christianity." Critiques of capitalism and privatization don't seem to me to be necessary for this particular film. Brazil, the version with Gilliam's ending, anyway, definitely gets the politics of late-capitalist bureaucracies--but I don't think that is what Gilliam is after here at all. On the other hand, Tideland, I would argue, does deal with Christianity, at least implicitly (burial rituals, the material resurrection of the body, etc.)). The little girl uses myth and narrative to make sense of her limited world, and a critique of larger mythic systems around her will be implicit in such a fiction, as a matter of course.
I don't think Gilliam is irresponsible or positively portrays other current social systems, I just don't think the interest of the film lies there. The focus is elsewhere.
I wrote this post because the press is crucifying Gilliam for this movie, which I think is thoughtless. It's not his best film, but it is a Gilliam film, and it is worthy of him. It is about, at it's most interesting level, storytelling itself and both the clarity and blindness brought by it (autoaffection).
Having said all that, I fully expect to like Pan's Labyrinth more than this film, and I'm jealous of you bastards for already having seen it.
I'm afraid I have to make a prediction about Pan's Labyrinthe: you, geoffreycrayon, will hate it. You'll find it boring and pedantic. It must be so. Else the world crumbles into chaos.
It's like some god cursed us. "For a thousand says and a thousand nights, never shall ye see the self-same worthy tale--except if ye both watch it at dawn or dusk, and only then for mere seconds!"
Of course, my objections to the film aren't paranioac reactions to the sight of a little girl holding a hypodermic, so I think I can safely say that I don't feel Gilliam derserves to be "crucified" for this film at all. In fact, I don't think the film deserves nearly as much attention as it has gotten. That being said, I'll be interested to see what you think of Del Toro's vision of girlhood myth-making, and how it stacks up to this film.
Oh--and I love Charles Dickens. Don't forget that I'm a melodramatic sympathizer.
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