Film Review: Tideland

Jeliza Rose is all alone in a barren Texas landscape, far from the house where she's been staying with her father. She trots through tall grass, talking and singing to herself, her companions the heads of dolls she wears on her fingers. She finds an overturned, burned out school bus and eagerly climbs inside to talk to the fireflies floating inside of its charred husk, and when a train roars by mere feet from the bus, she screams in joy as the she is rocked by the wind and fury of the passing locomotive.



Terry Gilliam's Tideland opens this way, presenting to us a preteen girl who is simultaneously typical and wildly unusual. Since she was born, Jeliza Rose has been falling down a rabbit hole, and as she falls, she does not try to climb back to the normal world. Like Alice Liddell, she wonders what the next curious sights she will encounter will be, and falls and falls and falls.

Alice in Wonderland was the starting point for Jeliza Rose's story, but the film, based on Mitch Cullin's novel of the same name, does not cling to the structure of Lewis Carroll's Alice series. We are presented with a young girl divorced from reality(as well as a Mad Hatter of sorts), and the film goes in a new direction from there. A budding female with a penchant for drama, Jeliza Rose deals with the horrors of her world through playacting. Living in a crumbling apartment with her neglectful parents(Jeliza herself is described as having been a "lip smacking little junkie baby.. irritable and hyperactive", which only hints at her mental peculiarities), she seems to be hardly affected when, one night, her mother dies of a drug overdose. Her father, a heroin addicted musician, flees with her to the country house where he lived as a child. It is now abandoned and falling apart, and soon after they arrive, he overdoses as well. Jeliza is not utterly alone, as she still has the heads of her dolls to keep her company. These heads represent different aspects of her personality. Sateen Lips and Baby Doll voice doubts and insecurities Jeliza feels, while Mustique(who resembles Jeliza's mother, though the doll head is more sensible) and Glitter Gal are headstrong and fearless.

She also meets Dell, a madwoman who wears a heavy black coat and tall hat with a veil to protect herself from bee stings, and Dickens, her epileptic, lobotomized little brother. As bizarre as Jeliza Rose's life has become, she is a typical child in many ways. She wants a family, and surrounds herself with characters, whether they are imaginary friends or real people she has become attached to. Though Dell is coarse and violent and Dickens is a mentally unstable adult, Jeliza wants to have a best friend and a boyfriend, and so in her mind they are just that. She has been so influenced by films and romantic stories that she finds a way to twist all of the situations she finds herself in to fit the formulae of fairy tales and soap operas. Even the death of her mother is an ideal subject to reenact in front of a mirror, dressed up in a wig and makeup.

Many have criticized the story of Tideland for being too bleak and morbid to be palatable, but the qrotesqueness of Jeliza's surroundings is essential. Jeliza Rose survives more horrors in a few short days than many little girls will face in a lifetime, and she does not merely endure, she is triumphant. As the director, Terry Gilliam said- "Children are resilient, when you drop them, they bounce." Tideland is a story dominated by the theme of resilience, survival against all odds. Gilliam has made many films about dreamers, but though Jeliza Rose inhabits a dreamlike world, there are not many sequences in Tideland that are explicitly dreams. We see things, generally, as they are actually occurring. It is Jeliza's take on her environment which is truly important. Tideland addresses, albeit in a skewed, unusual way, many of the principles which are core to Girls' Studies, which include, as Lipkin states, “important realities of girls' lives- How resilient girls can be, how much they often take on, how important female friendship is, how they learn to grow an emotional center within themselves as they meet challenges, and the place they hold within their families.” Jeliza's home is on the barren prairie with the fireflies; and though eventually, like Alice, she returns to the 'normal world', she still holds a place within this family of strange creatures.