Toronto Dispatch. 2.

Every year I come to the Toronto International Film Festival in the hope that I'll be surprised by a film made in Canada. I already have been this time. Terry Gilliam's Tideland takes on the worn notion of an epic within a child's head, and turns it into something logistically grand and ambitious, and seems to have been made without much concern for its commercial possibilities. I wish him and his investors well. The film does not yet have a distributor.

The film is one of many adaptations of novels at Toronto this year, this one from the novel of the same name by Mitch Cullin. The book is a child's picaresque interior monologue that might seem un-filmable. (Many may still feel that way after seeing its world premiere in Toronto last night.)

I'm not so sure, but Tideland is nothing if not challenging. It's the story of Jeliza-Rose (Jodelle Ferland), the wise daughter of two drugged-out rockers who are now retired into full-time stupor in a house cluttered with every kind of object. That plenitude of ephemera is the fertile soil for this child's near-infinite imagination, which is really the subject of the book and the film. Her father, Noah (Jeff Bridges), is a retired bawdy bad-ass star who has his daughter shoot him up for a "vacation." Her nasty mother (Jennifer Tilly) now worries about varicose veins and has fallen into an addiction that combines drugs with candy bar binges. Jeliza-Rose is their full-time nurse, although the only drug in her medicine chest seems to be heroin. There's a chorus that observes it all - a group of dolls whose heads were removed from their bodies long ago. They might be angels, or they might be Gilliam's homage to the tradition of all the Chuckie scare-flicks. Tideland is full - and I mean full - of what look like homages. They're endless - just think of the title, The Kid Stays in the Picture.

When the mother dies of an OD, father and daughter set out on a bus for his family home on the prairie - an odyssey, with emphasis on odd. We're not told exactly where, but the film was shot in Saskatchewan. (Jodell Ferland is Canadian - remember that anything Canadian is big here.)

I won't give the story away - trying to figure it out is one of Tideland's many challenges - but once Noah and Jeliza-Rose reach their crumbling house on the prairie, Noah nods into eternity from an injection administered lovingly by his daughter, and she's on her own, with her dolls, a half-wit named Dickens (Brendan Fletcher, another Canadian) in swim gear (the fool on the heath?) and his sister, Dell, who's dressed like a witch.

Death and the anticipation of death are all over this film, as is the enigma of innocence in a soiled world of surrender to temptation - or whether there is such a thing as innocence. Also everywhere are dolls, grimy lace, rocks, stuffed animals, bodily fluids and just plain dirt that made me think of Alice and Wonderland outfitted from the prop room of Delicatessen. The parallels are endless, from Psycho in the old house to anything by Lewis Carroll, to the most commercial of haunted house horror.

Gilliam doesn't hold back - the final scene could make this movie hard to market - again, I won't give it away. But if you ever thought you were the victim of deep inner drives that you could not understand, this film will confirm your feelings, as Jeliza-Rose wades through the debris that Gilliam seems to be telling us is consciousness, already littered beyond repair for a child of ten. The fact that this film is two hours long doesn't make it any more lucid. Just bear in mind that the film is shot on the lyrical grassy prairie, so your eyes do get lots of relief from the tawdry interiors. If you can't enjoy that, blame Canada.

That said, Bridges and Tilly are quirky fun, and Jodelle Ferland is a delight - confident, composed, impish and sly. The extraordinary kid is now all of ten years old. It's the ultimate cliché to say that we'll be seeing a lot more of her, but we will.

On a completely different note, I've always felt that filmmakers ought to be far more familiar than they usually are with other art forms, so Michael Almereyda's William Eggleston in the Real World is a refreshing break from the insular convention that insulated filmmakers know little else than film.

Eggleston is now a modern classic who has been called the father of modern color photography and also the "Fred Astaire" of that medium. Of those two descriptions, and there have been many more, father is about right. Almereyda has produced a hymn to Eggleston, so it's important to know (and the film tells you) that people did not always characterize Eggleston and his work so positively. When the first exhibition of his photographs opened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in the late 1970s, some critics dismissed Eggleston's pictures of ordinary people and places (mostly not far from his native Memphis, and in their real colors) as ugly and boring, and this was at a time when MoMA really did shape contemporary taste. Eggleston's practice of taking just one exposure of an image also challenged conventional wisdom in photography. Now Eggleston is in the contemporary pantheon - oh, and the critics adore him.

Almereyda's camera follows the slight professorial Eggleston around, first in a town in Kentucky where the February wind is blowing so strong that it whistles through the windscreen on the microphone, and then on to friends' houses, to many exhibitions, and to a pro forma awards dinner or two, and finally to a brief interview - interview being the format that makes the laconic Eggleston least likely to talk. Almereyda knows this and takes it on just the same to get Eggleston to talk about what he calls his "war against the obvious."

Almereyda begins his film by saying that photography is better at showing than at explaining, and his film is best when it uses a camera style clearly influenced by Eggleston's still photos to show how this photographer works and how he interacts with people and places. The film also gives us a taste of Eggleston's video work from 1973, the tactile and woozy and rarely-seen Stranded in Canton, a stunning debut shot - of all places, mostly in New Orleans - in a medium which Eggleston later abandoned. It shows at the festival later in the coming week and should be sought out by everyone who can see it. (The terminally shy Eggleston is supposed to be here. I'll believe that when I see him.) Almereyda says that Eggleston "will change the way you see, and the way you think about seeing." You could say that about any artist whose art is worth looking at, but this film shows you why, thanks partly to Almereyda's lucid narration, which takes you right into the work, and explains much of what we are told can't be explained. With so many films out there about artists that don't tell you much, here's one to see. It's already at the Film Forum in New York, and is dsitributed by Palm Pictures.

Posted by dwhudson at September 10, 2005 8:28 AM