TIDELAND

Shot in Saskatchewan, Tideland sees the director reunited with Jeff Bridges in a delirious, hallucinatory tale set against the wheat fields and big sky of the Prairies. But the centre of the film is Jeliza-Rose, a spry, endlessly curious girl who is apparently unfazed by anything - including jamming needles into her junkie parents' arms. Bridges plays Noah, a burnt-out rock star who lives in squalid retirement with his equally blitzed, semi-hysteric wife, whose death forces Noah and Jeliza-Rose to retreat to a ramshackle wooden house in the Prairies. Noah's drugged stupor leaves Jeliza-Rose alone to roam the beckoning grasslands and lose herself in her own fantasy world where fireflies have names, bog-men awaken at dusk and the heads of her four dolls are her company. That is, until she meets Dickens, a mentally challenged young man who instantly becomes her best friend. Dickens dresses in swim gear, hides out in a "submarine" and waits to catch the monster shark that inhabits the railway tracks.

”Gilliam enters the world of a child with his arsenal of fanciful imagery full, drawing on Alice in Wonderland andThe Wizard of Oz to boot. But the film is finally pure Gilliam, an assault on the senses, feverishly ambitious and full of the comedy and weirdness that has won him a deserved reputation as an anarchist and artist of uncommon vision."
Piers Handling