Tideland is a 2005 British-Canadian fantasy thriller film co-written and directed by Terry Gilliam, an adaptation of Mitch Cullin's novel of the same name. The film was shot in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, and surrounding area in the fall and winter of 2004. The world premiere was at the 2005 Toronto International Film Festival, where the film was met with mixed response from both viewers and critics. After little interest from U.S. distributors, THINKFilm picked the film up for a U.S. release date in October 2006.
Title
The film's title appears in dialogue written by Gilliam and co-writer Tony Grisoni in which Noah (Jeff Bridges) says, "Daddy's gonna stroll down that far subterranean shore, all littered with the flotsam of hopes and dreams. Relics of ancient times. Lonely cenotaphs. Standing along that melancholy tideland." In Cullin's novel, however, there is no such dialogue from the character of Noah, and the only mention of the book's title comes at the end of Chapter 21, last paragraph, when the first-person voice of Jeliza Rose says, "Before sleep, the last sound to fill my ears was the beating of my heart, and I knew I was slipping past the tideland, going beneath the ocean and sinking away from What Rocks."
Plot
Tideland centers on an abandoned child, Jeliza-Rose (Jodelle Ferland), and her solitary adventures during one summer in rural Texas while staying at a rundown farmhouse called What Rocks, and focuses on the increasingly dark, imaginative fantasy life the girl creates with the aid of dismembered Barbie doll heads that she often wears on her fingertips. With names such as Mustique, Sateen Lips, Baby Blonde and Glitter Gal, the doll heads not only engage in long conversations with Jeliza-Rose, reflecting different aspects of the girl's psyche, but also act as her companions while she explores the barren Texas landscape.
After her mother (Jennifer Tilly) overdoses on drugs, Jeliza-Rose and her father, Noah (Jeff Bridges), flee to Noah's mother's home, a remote Texas farmhouse. Noah fears that with all the drugs in their house he will lose Jeliza-Rose and be sent to prison, so he attempts to set it alight before they leave, although Jeliza-Rose manages to stop him. They find the farmhouse abandoned, but they settle in anyway. Their first night there, Noah dies from a heroin overdose. For much of the rest of the film, Noah's corpse remains seated upright in a living room chair with sunglasses covering his eyes. As her father slowly begins to rot, Jeliza-Rose doesn't readily acknowledge his death because she has grown accustomed to him being unconscious for long periods at a time. Instead, she retreats deeper and deeper into her own mind, exploring the tall grass around the farmhouse, relying on her doll heads for friendship as an unconscious way of keeping herself from feeling too lonely and afraid.
During Jeliza-Rose's wanderings, she eventually encounters and befriends her neighbors, a mentally impaired young man called Dickens (Brendan Fletcher) and his older sister Dell (Janet McTeer) who is blind in one eye from a bee sting. At this point the story begins to unfold, revealing a past connection between Dell and Jeliza-Rose's deceased father. The eccentric neighbors take the girl under their wing, going so far as to preserve Noah's body via taxidermy (which Dell and Dickens did to their own dead mother). Amorous feelings, initiated mostly by the much younger Jeliza-Rose, begin to creep into the child-like relationship between her and Dickens, and it is revealed that the deeply troubled Dickens, a man-child who once drove a school bus in front of an oncoming train, keeps a stash of dynamite in his bedroom that he intends to use against the Monster Shark he believes is roaming the countryside. The Monster Shark is, in reality, the nightly passenger train that travels past the farmhouse where Jeliza-Rose and her dead father reside.
What follows is literally an explosive conclusion to the film, one in which Dickens blasts a hole into the real world by dynamiting the train from its tracks, creating a scene of chaos near the farmhouse. Wandering about the wreckage, and among the confusion of injured travelers, Jeliza-Rose is discovered by a woman who survived, and she assumes the little girl is also a victim of the train wreck. The woman offers her a clementine while Dell frantically searches the wreck for signs of her brother Dickens.
Cast
Jodelle Ferland as Jeliza-Rose
Brendan Fletcher as Dickens
Jeff Bridges as Noah, Jeliza-Rose's father
Jennifer Tilly as Queen Gunhilda, Jeliza-Rose's mother
Janet McTeer as Dell
Dylan Taylor as Patrick
Sally Crooks as Dell's mother
