by Andrew Reynolds

Created on: February 09, 2007   Last Updated: May 09, 2007

Terry Gilliam, it would appear is a man driven by chaos. From the castration of funds for Baron Munchhausen, to crippling studio interference on Brazil, Gilliam has a habit of always appearing to be King Lear to Hollywood's Tempest.
While Lost in La Mancha went part of the way to convince audiences that the acts of sabotage were not entirely his own making, it also left him stricken, after The Man Who Kill Don Quixote...well died, with no artistic ventures to cling on to.

With Good Omens, Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett's apocalyptic comedy, fantasy novel and the much delayed Watchman adaptation staling, it was left to Gilliam to quixotically ride out to Hollywood, giving him both a return to directing and an unwelcome dose of creative inertia (for an excellent account of this studio medley see Bob Mccabe's Dreams and Nightmares), courtesy of the Weinstein Brothers, The Brothers Grimm.
From the ashes of that debacle comes Tideland, made during a period of contention between the studio and Gilliam whilst editing The Brothers Grimm, which was, due to the lack of studio financing, Gilliam's first chaos free set since he called a wrap on Time Bandits.
Only now something has changed, the chaotic visuals and wild spurts of imagination are not deflecting the strained atmosphere, they are creating it.
Not since Baron Munchhausen has Gilliam clearly set out to disorientate and bewilder his audience, whilst simultaneously playing with the notions of cinema.
Like Bunuel, Fellini and most tellingly Welles, Gilliam wants to taunt the very psychological process of watching movies.
From the opening quotation of Alice in Wonderland set to a blank screen, Gilliam is denying Lacan, Suture and psychological analysis.
The movie itself follows the life of Eliza Rose (Jouelle Ferland, whose outstanding performance captivates with her secret asides and lost worlds ), an imaginative girl weaned on a life of servitude to her heroin addicted father (Jeff Bridges, who appears to be challenging the same subculture that spawned the Dude) and her emotionally dead mother (Jennifer Tilly, whose outrageously over the top performance makes her death early on, all the more sweeter.) When her mother dies, on the run, both her and her father arrive at her grandmother's house, situated in the same idyllic, fairytale Americana as Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter, where upon after arriving, her father OD's leaving Eliza to a world of her own imagination.
By forcing us to live with her through her

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