| Transcribo como salió publicado en New York Press la semana pasada. |
| A macabre trip through the rabbit hole of Gilliam’s mind |
Terry Gilliam knows how to make hallucinatory images appear utterly believable. He’s taken us on strange trips through adult wonderlands that teeter into horrific territory (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) and fantastic worlds we’d never actually want to step foot in (Brazil), but in his latest feature, Tideland, Gilliam looks at the world from a tormented little girl’s perspective.
The daughter of two junkies, Jeliza-Rose (Jodelle Ferland) has to grow up quickly and mostly by herself. She seems to be in control of her parents’ run-down place—she’s given the chore of cooking up their heroin in syringes—but her tilted world raises serious doubts as to whether she’s ever going to have much of a future.
After her mother dies, Jeliza-Rose and her father Noah, a rocker way past his prime (played by an almost unrecognizable Jeff Bridges), hop on a bus in search of Grandma’s house, a deserted shack in a baroque-bizarre field of dreams. A giant monster shark, fireflies with names and never-ending rabbit holes make this golden landscape a mix between Alice in Wonderland and a slasher flick. The childish, spooky scenery is at times playful—like when Jeliza-Rose chats with a talking jailed squirrel—but has a way of becoming horrific, too close to insanity and surrounded by an ever-present stench of death and disinfectant.
The film’s backbone rests in the conversations between Jeliza-Rose and four doll heads—Mystique, Baby Blonde, Glitter Gal and Sateen Lips—that she’s ripped from their bodies and plays with as finger puppets (all voiced wonderfully by Ferland). Once she leaves the confines of the house, she meets Dell (Janet McTeer), whom she believes is a ghost, and her young brother, Dickens (Brendan Fletcher), who’s older than Jeliza-Rose but whose troubled mind makes him her best possible side-kick. Her closeness with the couple takes the girl deeper into her mix of reality and imagination, while providing her with the only humans who seem to be interested in what she has to say.
Filled with Gilliam’s dark humor and attention to detail, the movie is too disturbing for most children and just as hard to swallow for adults—which might make Gilliam fans happy. The camerawork and distorted lenses help magnify the vertigo of this young girl’s trip through her imagination, but they do little to mask her intimate relationship with Dickens, which is as naive as it is disturbing.
Although the film fails to measure up to his best work, this fascinating portrait of a strange young girl’s lurid coming of age should find an audience outside Gilliam’s rabid pack of followers.
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