DVD Pick of the Week: TIDELAND
DVD Pick of the Week: TIDELAND
Poor Terry Gilliam. Despite his storied career as a member of Monty Python and a critically-acclaimed, fanboy-revered maverick director, virtually every film he’s made in his thirty-plus years behind the camera has been beset by some kind of struggle. Yet where once, his bitter studio battle over Brazil or the escalating budget of The Adventures of Baron Munchausen became legendary examples of success despite adversity, Gilliam’s luck in recent years has been slim. Though chronicled in the great documentary Lost In La Mancha, his period piece The Man Who Killed Don Quixote fell apart spectacularly; his adaptation of the Gaiman/Pratchett masterpiece Good Omens remains unproduced, despite the fact that the book’s fans maintain he’s the only director who could do it justice. (Present company included.) And last year, his eccentrically bleak coming of age tale Tideland virtually came and went without so much as a peep. Fortunately, it arrives on disc this week in case you blinked and missed it the first time.
In many ways, Tideland is the darkest film yet from a filmmaker who has practically beat a path to embrace dark themes and downbeat endings his entire career. Gilliam’s unmatched capacity for whimsy, despite the deepest tragedy, is what keeps buoyant the tale of Jeliza-Rose (Jodelle Ferland), a young girl who is taken to a rural farmhouse by her father after her mother dies of a heroin overdose, as her methods of coping with the tragedy becoming increasingly bizarre. Young Ferland delivers a remarkable performance that more than holds its ground against two of the finest actors around: Jeff Bridges, as her father, and Janet McTeer as a local oddball she befriends. With a loose storytelling structure and a lot of difficult material, Tideland isn’t a walk in the park but for fans of the avant garde, as well as Gilliam aficionados, though it is well worth a look.
Other recommended titles for February 27th: Magnum P.I.: Season 6; Stranger Than Fiction; Tenacious D: The Pick of
Destiny; Voltron Vol. 3
—Nicole Campos
