The Not-Ready-for-the-Paper Movie Review
Tideland
To call this a movie review could be quite an understatement.
I've been thinking about art a lot lately. Part of being the editor of a weekly paper is coping with the omnipresence of deadlines and stress. Things always need to be accomplished now and now and now. I love my job dearly, it's the first time I have ever been okay with my life becoming my job, however there are some things that are important to me that fall to the wayside because of this hectic new pace. The most precious of these failings is my time for my craft as a writer.
I was frustrated and driving through our hot town in my black, air-conditionless car this week when my phone rang. It was my writing mentor. She claimed to have a vision of me red-faced and pursing my lips. This vision wasn't too far from accurate. She asked me to come over and so I did. In the brief few moments that she and I spoke I realized that my life would have no modicum of satisfaction or joy unless I worked on the things that satisfied me on a deeper level than just Jacksonville's entertainment.
I recently interviewed a good friend and a talented writer and artist (among other things) Oscar Senn. Oscar told me of an equation for happiness that he had learned about and how important it was to make good use of your time and invest in voluntary activity that makes you happy. It is one of the few aspects of our happiness that we can control.
Taking all of these things in only frustrated me further, because the desire to adequately use your free time is great, but if you only get a few moments of free time every week, you tend to fall asleep in those moments. But the other night, instead of sleeping, which I desperately needed, and instead of working, which I had plenty of backed up, and instead of writing, because my wife prefers that I spend my minutes with her actually with her, I watched the movie Tideland.
In college I have always had a tendency to way overshoot expectation when it came to papers. I rarely did the least I could do. I have a love for learning and a natural curiosity that has always driven me on, so when I took on a director's analysis paper of Terry Gilliam, I turned in a paper and a DVD that almost rivaled a master’s thesis, even though this was only an elective, humanities credit. The point being, I am an enormous Terry Gilliam fan and I am thoroughly versed on his voice in cinema, so I have been eager to see this film for some time. Lord knows his vision needed some redemption after Brothers Grimm.
Kellie Abrahamson, a skilled writer that contributes to EU, wrote a review of the DVD when it first hit the disc, and although her review was complementary, it was ambiguous and understated (read that short review). Plus, I have no way of knowing just how familiar she is with his work or how to frame her opinion. It didn't matter; I had to see it for myself either way. Then I got scared. Everyone I asked, even those whose artistic appreciation I truly respect, said it was a terrible film. Even Brothers Grimm, easily Gilliam's most clumsy and forgettable work, was not a "terrible film."
The mentor I spoke of earlier, she sends me this email every six months or so (it may be because she is getting batty in her old age or it may be she thinks the lesson hasn’t been learned yet) that quotes the beginning of Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer: "This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty . . . what you will. I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing. I will sing while you croak, I will dance over your dirty corpse."
When Tideland starts, it opens to a black and white, close-up shot of Terry Gilliam. He explains that many people will hate this film, but it is important to understand how it celebrates childhood. His remarks were unsettling, and my wife and I had second thoughts about watching it. When a man and his wife are snuggled between pillows on a couch to watch a movie, it is hard not to be in the mindset that a movie is about entertainment. Terry Gilliam's Tideland is NOT about entertainment.
Don't misunderstand that statement. This film is beautiful and truer than any true story. Consistent with Gilliam's constant theme, that the line between sanity and insanity is a choice (or if it isn't a choice, then it doesn't matter) this film tells the story of a girl who was abandoned by the only world she ever knew. She unwittingly kills her father and strands herself in a nearly imaginary world, sleeping at night on her dead father's lap and engrossing herself, socially, only in the world of her doll heads, each of which has their own personality, name, and voice.
Soon she meets a woman named Dell who has an irrational fear of bees and a "brother" named Dickens who had his brain severed to stop his seizures. Dell has imaginary friends in her dolls too, only her dolls are taxidermied corpses. It just so happens that the young girl also has a corpse that can use Dell's talents. For this abandoned and alone child that is so resourceful and has had to be so resilient and autonomous throughout most of her life, the end of the world could not possibly be a bad thing. So when she falls in love with the mentally disabled Dickens, he with his own strange fantasy world, and he moves to bring the end of the world to their strange, isolated existence, he saves the little girl by destroying many lives in order to bring the little girl out of hers.
This movie was painful to watch, and as Kellie said in her review "Like a car crash, you want to look away, but your eyes won’t allow it." It is not a popcorn flick. You will not laugh out loud. You will not sit on the edge of your seat. You will cringe and peek through parted fingers as the terrible adventure rolls on. As you dread each new reality that this innocent young girl encounters. This is not a Hollywood movie; this is a work of art. This film does not make you smile or excite your senses, as Fisher King, Brazil, and 12 Monkeys all did, this film serves only one function: to teach. To make us look harder at the spirit of a child and to try harder to understand its depth and meaning. To look at imagination and how it heals, hurts, helps, and destroys. This film makes us pursue that elusive concept that is love, human companionship, relationships, sympathy, empathy, passion.Amazingly shot and flawlessly acted, this film tells a terrible story that everyone needs to hear.
With that said (that is the movie review portion of this rant) the point is that I remembered how important art is, even when it is not wanted. People said this film was terrible because an 8-year-old girl kisses a thirty-year-old man and it is presented as almost innocent and acceptable, given these circumstances, and that makes it even harder to deal with.
I first learned of the film more than a year ago, all of the information about it was on imdb.com but I could find the film anywhere. All I could find were bloggers railing the film (which goes to show that mass media cannot be blamed for America's disdain for art...that is to say, it isn't television's fault that most Americans would choose a night at Applebee’s over a night at the local art museum, it is something dreadfully imbedded in American culture). So I forgot about the quest until I saw Terry Gilliam panhandling from people in line to see The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Jon Stewart called attention to it. Hollywood wouldn't distribute his film. It wasn't commercially viable, and that is the problem. Commerce in this country gets in the way of art, but art is so important because it makes us think about what we believe, what is real, and what humanity is capable of.If only for this reason, I now know that art, regardless of whether it pays any bills, is the most important thing in my cultural awareness. It is the only way, other then sex, that any two people can really communicate without all of our rhetoric getting in the way. It is as Oscar Senn said. "God is my progenitor. He creates. That's what I do. I create." It is humankind's need to create that pulls from our very souls why we exist. We don't name our airports after artists here, we name them after politicians. We don't believe in expression the way we think we do, we believe in ideologies. We believe in concepts. We believe in things as a mass populace, but we refuse that very thing that makes Americans different from most other nations - the strength and power of individualism. To celebrate an artists' vision is important even if all it does is facilitate their next vision, or the next artists' vision. This film has certainly bolstered my need to get back to my craft. To write, not just to tell you about cool new artists or musicians through the paper I work for, but to be one of the individuals that contribute to art. American art. American culture. We are what we eat. If that is all video games and action films, we are fucked. We are all stuck in Applebee’s forever.
Anyway, it was a good movie.
