Cast

Jeff Bridges, Jodelle Ferland, Jennifer Tilly, Janet McTeer

awards

San Sebastián IFF 2005 – FIPRESCI Award

Film description

After the chronicle of excess that was Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Tideland offered Gilliam’s second examination of counterculture’s self-destructive tendencies. Tideland is entertainment one might expect in the confines of a bomb crater after a catastrophe. But underneath dark fantasy is a parody of counterculture ideals of boundless utopia: Jeliza-Rose’s parents are dissenters without a cause whose negative energy turns their life to dust. When the young girl finds herself living alone in a decrepit Texas farmhouse, her imagination replaces family memories. Unconscious of a previous life and surrounded by artefacts of the past devoid of earlier meaning, Jeliza-Rose’s fantasies become her only way of discovering the world. With no ethical judgments, Tideland is an unprejudiced child’s perspective of tender innocence and unconventional emotion. Gilliam has always glorified fantasy, but in Tideland he is almost an observer of the potential of unfettered imagination – in awe, yet somewhat fearful. Imagination becomes a perilous force that is able to create as well as destroy in the blink of an eye. But Gilliam shows that it is also a force that dissipates when faced with knowledge – imagination’s counterpart and the only force able to tame it.