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 dreams and her imaginary friends, represented by her collection of dolls heads, whilst showing how amoral and destitute her home life is, our prejudices stand in the way of us forming our own mirror image within the protagonist.
An irony which is not lost on Gilliam, who in celebrating both her fantasy, then her ability to meld with Dickens (Brendan Fletcher, both uncomfortable and heartfelt as a wannabe bomber after a lobotomy can be in one of the more outre performances)recaptures the giddy abandon of his earlier work, whilst showing the audience, in a rather gruesome human taxidermy scene how quickly we can both wallow in, then escape in fantasy.
Even the escape itself comes beautifully childlike in its construction such as the handcrafted fish floating in Dickens ocean contrasted with the yellow expanse of the field of maize which allegorically shifts and sways with Eliza's emotions.
Though the allegorical nature of the film is not always entirely successful. By using both Alice and common psychological analysis metaphors, such as Dickens saying he does not have a "special secret," echoing the castrating effect of suture, the characters are often reduced to two dimensional cyphers rather than full blooded humans, which leaves the more flamboyant moments feeling rather forced. Fantasy, has always been an at the forefront of the oral tradition of narrative cinema, from Todorov to Wheadon and despite the willingness to acknowledge and play with genres, such as horror (notably the Texas Chain Saw Massacre,)this element becomes more jarring when the film inevitably switches to focus on the burgeoning family.
While Gilliam is no stranger to satire, from the counter cultural malaise at the increased political and social upheaval in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas to the Heath like portrayal of a murderous, bureaucratically anal British society in Brazil,Though no one has ever called Gilliam's satire, which is broadly influenced by MAD magazine, subtle, with Tideland this characteristic relies too heavily on the same broad psychological areas such as sexuality, madness and innocence that it seeks to rape the audience of during the first half, undoing all the clever attacks on human psychoanalytical tools and fantasy.
In the end however its this element rather than the broader fantasy analysis that will most like force the audience into a conclusion, the chaos it seems would be in not responding.