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.
