Film: Tideland
Tagline
This hundred year ocean where dreams are made.
Plot
In the beginning of the book Alice in Wonderland, little girl Alice falls down a rabbit hole. She lands in a world where big is small and beautiful is ugly, but in the end she manages to find her way back up. Just like Alice, the viewer falls down a hole in the beginning of Tideland, to another world. This time it’s more like a manhole though.
Tideland is a fairytale for adults. For adults in the broadest sense of the word ‘adult’. The narration carries characteristics of a fairytale: a wicked witch, talking animals, a child left alone by her parents. The image is enchanting at times, with a lonely house up a hill, surrounded by a waving sea of grain and characters who each have their own suit. We see everything through the eyes of a child, Jeliza-Rose (a disturbingly clever role of Jodelle Ferland). But on a deeper level, down the drain, awaits reality. For a child, the reality outlined in the movie might be normal, but for the attentive and critical viewer there are quite a lot of wants in the story. What kid gives her father a hand at using drugs? What kid talks to the heads of her dolls and watches them come alive? What kid lives in complete harmony with death?
This and many other things that differ from our daily reality, from what we consider ‘normal’, make that the movie gets a deeper meaning than just a simple girl left alone, sad but everything comes all right in the end and she even gets to marry the handsome prince story. There are no loving parents in this film, nor happiness, and no handsome prince. That part is put aside for the somewhat feeble-minded captain of a submarine, Dickens (Brendan Fletcher), who moreover seems to be interested in the girl’s body of Jeliza-Rose than the kid as a pal to play with. Being the brother of the wicked witch acts in his advantage though. It is because of this that he is incapable of living a live on his own. His relationship with his sister Dell (Janet McTeer) is a stereotypical one: they can’t live with or without each other. Because of his feeble-mindedness, Dickens seems to be the most dependent one, but sideways we get to know that Dell can’t live without him either.
Dell plays a double part in the movie. On the one hand she’s the wicked witch, who acts like a witch, is superstitious as hell and above all freaking scary. From Jeliza-Rose’s point of view she’s not that weird, because she happens to live in a world where this type of bad step mom occurs quite frequently. On the other hand Dell is the woman who feeds Jeliza-Rose and fixes all sorts of domestic jobs. With that she shows her kindness of heart, though it’s kind of a weird heart.
The way Jeliza-Rose treats these two persons is formed by the way they treat her. She’s free, high-spirited and faces the most bizarre things fairly fearless. Meeting a witch and her little brother is after all a children’s game compared to entering grandma’s scary attic. Thank God her dolls are always there to help her face difficult decisions. However, the dolls are also responsible for the girl staying in her children’s world. There’s not a moment in the film, once Jeliza-Rose is on her own, that she is able to look at her situation from an adult point of view. Her life remains a chain of surrealistic and bizarre happenings that she can’t seem to get hold of. At the same time it is this aspect of the movie that creates a fascinating atmosphere.
Verdict: Filming the life of a child through the eyes of a grown-up can be pretty boring. But if we leave that focus, and concentrate on the things that Jeliza-Rose herself sees and experiences, the movie gets its magical character. Nonetheless, because of the sinister undertone it remains a fairytale for adults.