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Director of daftness hits a low with 'Tideland'

BY JAN STUART | Newsday Staff Writer

October 13, 2006

Terry Gilliam has never been a man of small gestures. With "Tideland," the director of such daft extravaganzas as "Brazil" and "The Fisher King" has taken what amounts to a tawdry carnival sideshow and moved it into the big tent.

Based on the Mitch Cullen novel from 2000, "Tideland" follows the dark journey of a little girl with an astonishingly bad track record when it comes to authority figures. The daughter of two junkies, 9-year-old Jeliza-Rose (Jodelle Ferland) dutifully prepares heroin injections for her ex-rocker dad, Noah (Jeff Bridges), and substitutes her degenerate groupie mother (Jennifer Tilly) with a collection of dolls' heads.

When mom kicks off, Noah and Jeliza-Rose trundle off in a bus to an abandoned family farmhouse in Texas. While dad wastes away, Jeliza-Rose reverts to her fantasy world, communing with her surrogate-sister dolls and playing dress-up with her late grandmother's costume trunk. Eventually, she expands her playgroup to include Dickens, the mentally arrested epileptic next door (Brendan Fletcher) and his witchy taxidermist mother, Dell (Janet McTeer).

As if emulating Dell's trade, Gilliam drains any remaining signs of life and humanity from his adult characters, underscoring their grotesqueness with expressionistic camera work and shock-tactic effects. "Tideland's" gratuitous theatrics are diminished further by the watershed works it pirates: "Alice in Wonderland," Andrew Wyeth's "Christina's World," "Psycho" and "Spirit of the Beehive." It offers much to look at, but one set designer's paradise can be another moviegoer's hell.