‘I can see everything you can imagine,’ says one of the characters in Tideland. Gilliam shows us everything he imagines himself, from the perspective of 10-year-old Jeliza-Rose. She is a precocious girl, both of whose parents are addicted to heroin. Her father Noah (Jeff Bridges) is a rundown rock ‘n’ roll guitarist, her mother is a bedridden, hysterical woman. After her sudden death from an overdose, father and daughter leave for Noah’s parental home, a kind of Pippi-Longstocking little house on the prairie. Jeliza-Rose is a caring girl who prepares the needle when her father wants ‘just a little vacation’, makes sure that the cigarette in the ashtray is put out when he is unconscious and continues to feed peanut butter to the slowly decaying man. Jeliza-Rose withdraws into her fantasy world in which glow worms have names and squirrels talk. The girl has long conversations with Barbie dolls’ heads separated from their bodies, looks for fairies in the long grass and has amazing meetings with the retarded Dickens and his witch-like sister Dell. Tideland is a mixture of Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz and Psycho. It is a whirlwind and hallucinogenic fairy tale for adults, every shot is a joy for the eyes. Wide-angle lenses distort the perspective and the camera undulates over the mysteriously rustling fields in which Jeliza-Rose moves. Crazy, baroque, hallucinating, ominous and unpredictable. In other words a real Gilliam. (SdH)
