When a director with a distinctive vision and uniquely individual style manages to make movie after movie for more than thirty years, they're bound to end up recycling the same elements to the point where they become cliches. In the case of Terry Gilliam, those elements include the blurring of fantasy and reality, low-tech modifications of high-tech props, animated dream sequences, creatures and objects that burst through walls, skewed angles for many shots, mental disorders, odd perspectives and skewed proportions for the visual imagery, Sisyphean anti-establishment struggles, corrupt authority figures, children forced to take on adult roles in life and adults who've never reached maturity, to name a few.

What's truly remarkable in Gilliam's case, though, is that after so many films that incorporate most, if not all of those cliched elements - Time Bandits, Brazil, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, The Fisher King, Twelve Monkeys, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and The Brothers Grimm - is that he can craft a new film that includes almost of those stylistic elements and still manage to be unlike anything moviegoers have ever seen before. Which brings us to 2005's little-seen film, Tideland.

Tideland is, as Gilliam explains, and attempt to explore some of the horrors of the adult world through the innocence and purity of a child's eyes. It comes across as more than a little shocking at times, but that's because it's hard not to let everything we've learned in our adult lives color our perception of what's going on. As part of his introduction at the start of the DVD, Gilliam himself reminds us that "Children are strong, they're resilient, they're designed to survive. When you drop them, they tend to bounce." It's good advice to keep in mind throughout all the uncomfortable moments that follow.

The child at the heart of Tideland is ten-year-old Jeliza-Rose, offspring of two of the most unfit parents in recent cinematic history. Towards the beginning, we meet Jeliza-Rose's mother, Gunhilda, a strung-out methadone drone suffering from some tubercular disease who constantly screams at her daughter and threatens to take her away from her father, Noah, who is himself quite a piece of work. A faded rock star (or perhaps someone who just dreamt of being a rock star), Noah spends his time waiting for Jeliza-Rose to cook up shots of heroin for him so he can spend some time, as he puts it, "on vacation." Before long, Jeliza-Rose's mother succumbs to whatever sickness has been plaguing her, and in a panic, Noah, ever the responsible one, flees off to the remote countryside to lay low at his mother's old abandoned farm house in northern Texas with his daughter in tow. Junkie that he is, Noah goes "on vacation" that first night, and never comes to. It's clear to the audience what has happened by the next morning, but Jeliza-Rose, who's grown accustomed to living with him in a near constant stupor, remains blissfully ignorant of her father's fate even after the flies start to accrue over him and he begins to turn funny colors. Unaware that she's been left completely alone, Jeliza-Rose is happy to spend her time playing her collection of doll heads, her only real companions in life.

And from there we get the brunt of the film – Jeliza-Rose's explorations of the remote farmland around her. We watch through her perspective as a naively innocent child as she holds conversations with her doll heads, finds animals that appear to talk to her, meets Dell, a creepily reclusive taxidermist who lives at a nearby farm with her mentally retarded brother Dickens, who drags Jeliza Rose into his own flights of fancy. Jeliza-Rose's explorations grow more and more fantastical (with surreal images that show her literally swimming through the nearby wheat fields and falling down rabbit holes), as she remains plucky, cheerful, and blissfully unaware of the harsh reality that surrounds her.

Tideland is a visually stunning film. Gilliam and director of photography Nicola Pecorini capture the great plains superbly, showing its majestic beauty at one moment and its eerie isolation the next, with equal parts decay and vibrant abundance. The scenes are filled with a busy hodgepodge of surreal images, both in the reality of the world that Jeliza-Rose inhabits and in her escapist flights of imaginative fancy. And actress Jodelle Ferland, who plays our main character, is compelling to watch, capturing the wide-eyed wonder and innocence of childhood perfectly without falling prey to the pitfalls of cloying precociousness that can make so many child protagonists difficult to watch. Rarely has anyone as young as her carried an entire film so completely with so much natural presence.

But Tideland isn't without its frustrations. Gilliam has captured a child's perspective on the world perfectly, but children, left entirely to their own devices, can be a little tough to bear in large doses. Long stretches of film that feature Jeliza-Rose all alone simply talking to herself and holding conversations with her doll heads may be an accurate portrayal of childhood whimsy, but they tend to dilute the storytelling elements of the film. As we follow Jeliza-Rose, the plot meanders here and there like a grade-schooler passing a leisurely summer afternoon at a local playground. There's more than enough tension and scary moments, but they rarely gel together into a compelling whole. At times the movie, beautiful as it is, feels like a chore to sit through. As much as I enjoy this sort of movie centered around children using fantasy to escape from the heavy reality of the adult world around them, I found myself craving the intricate structure of similarly-themed movies like Pan's Labyrinth or Mirrormask instead of the meandering, picaresque unfocused nature of Tideland.

Gilliam himself seems well aware of the frustration that most people are going to feel in reaction to his film. In that opening introduction he tells us flat out that "many of you are not going to like this film, many of you are going to love it, and there are many of you who aren't going to know what to think when the film finished, but hopefully you'll be thinking."

I didn't love the movie, and I didn't hate it, but I don't think I quite fit in with Gilliam's third category, either. I found frustratingly beautiful, and beautifully frustrating. It’s a piece of exquisite thrift store trash, intriguing both despite and because of its flaws. It's definitely not a movie for everyone, but for anyone curious to see something unlike any film they've seen before, it's still worth a look.

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older