Tideland (Terry Gilliam, 2005)

 

Terry Gilliam is a filmmaker of incredible talent and imagination, but it's true that sometimes he is destroying his own beauty by making things hard for the spectator to follow. I would say that there is no really bad movie made by him. All of his films have something, something that makes them unique and made by a filmmaker with a roaring vision. Some of them are simply masterpieces of weird and uncompromising cinema, others are simply good movies and some far fewer are what you call... pain in the ass movies. Movies that could have been great, have all the momentum to be great, but somewhere along the line, something went horribly wrong and the outcome is somehow distorted, decadent. Tideland might be his weakest film ever. And that doesn't mean that it's a bad movie. No, on the contrary is a very promising movie, that goes from one bad choice to the other. As the film begins and ten minutes pass you say to yourself "man that's the old good Terry, again". But as the film proceeds and it, most definitely, proceeds in an unexpected way it becomes a truly and unforgivably tiresome, static movie, that you find yourself difficult to make it to the bitter end.

Weirdness and eccentricity are elements that I surely love and desire from a movie. But there are boundaries to this elements also. If you take too much of them, if you build your whole goddamn movie upon the most weird and the most eccentric, only for the sake of being odd, then chances are that you will fail, miserably, in the end. And that's what happened to Terry, he took things way too far with the quirky characters and the quirky story. Tideland becomes after some point a burden that you have to carry and a movie that doesn't go the next chapter of the story, but stays, obsessively, stuck, in one aspect of it. Yes the girl who plays is charismatic, but you cannot build a whole movie upon one character. Your film will be a fucking flaw, you will fail. There is no one that could direct such a vacant story that would have made it better. It's the screenplay that is horribly problematic here and it takes the movie to the fucking cliff. Terry wants to be a filmmaker that he is not carried away by what it sells and that's a great thing to do, but sometimes he mixes up the commercial with the watchable. This movie over here is on the verge of being unwatchable by many people. I would never recommend that movie to anyone, but hardcore film buffs and hardcore fans of Terry's cinema. And again I would have recommend it only to see how he failed and not because there is anything to it, other than his most stubborn obsessions. I hate to say that, but in this movie he lost me almost completely and I consider myself a devoted fan of his cinematic world.