DIRECTED BY: Jim Henson

FEATURING: Jennifer Connelly, David Bowie

PLOT: A dreamy teenage girl must rescue her kidnapped baby brother by journeying to the

Goblin City at the center of a bizarre labyrinth.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Despite the MC Escher-inspired set-design, the unexpected sexual tension between teenaged Connelly and fruitily-dressed goblin king Bowie, and a devout cult following, Labryinth is ultimately just too close to a mainstream Muppet fantasy to place on a List of the 366 Weirdest movies. We’ve passed over slightly stranger movies in this genre—the visually similar Henson-directed The Dark Crystal and the thematically similar Henson-produced MirrorMask—and, although I think Labyrinth is a better film than either of those, it’s difficult to justify certifying this one when its companion films don’t even get to sniff the List.

COMMENTS: In The Wizard of Oz, Judy Garland’s breasts were famously flattened out with tape so the 16-year old could play a pre-pubescent girl. Labyrinth takes a different strategy: 14-old Jennifer Connelly plays exactly her age, portraying a hormonally testy girl-woman caught at the stage where her attention starts to shift from stuffed animals to the well-stuffed pants of strutting rock stars. That shot of rising estrogen distinguishes Labyrinth from other Oz/Alice in Wonderland fairy tale variations, giving it a subtext that goes over the heads of the tots in the audience but leaves adults with additional nuggets to ponder (and no, that’s not another reference to Bowie’s stretch pants). There’s an impressive amount of imagination on display here, starting with Henson’s puppets, who reveal an almost limitless variety (each individual goblin looks like a representative of its own species) and a nearly human expressiveness (to be honest, the puppets out-act both Connelly and Bowie). The girl’s three companions—the cowardly dwarf Hoggle, the bestial Ludo, and Sir Didymus, the comic relief knight/terrier—are all worthy additions to Henson’s Muppet menagerie, and there is a zoo full of eccentric Wonderland-esque supporting creatures, including walking playing cards, talking door knockers, and an old man with a chicken for a hat. Heck, even the cannonballs in this movie are Muppets. Set design is another huge asset. The labyrinth itself, which includes occasional mythological guardians posing logic puzzles, evokes Lewis Carrol , while the finale takes place in a beautiful M.C. Escher reflexive dreamscape with relativistic gravity and staircases headed off at paradoxical angles. The intricate visual details give the film a high degree of re-watchability: keep an eye out for the illusion where stone outcroppings form a human face when viewed at exactly the right angle. Bowie’s musical contributions turn out to be a wash: “Underground,” which plays over the beginning and end credits, was a radio hit, and “Magic Dance” is a playfully wicked little baby-taunting tune, but to a large extent the 80s synth/drum-machine pop style does little more than date the film. Of course, we wouldn’t be reviewing this pic if there weren’t some delightfully weird nonsense moments to tickle your bizarre bone: a gnome spraying flowers to rid them of fairy pests, goblins tormenting a horned beast with dentures on a stick, and a dream-inside-a-dream at a masked Renaissance ball are a few of the highlights of kiddie surrealism. And, given Labyrinth‘s carnal awakening subtext, we’d be remiss if we didn’t spotlight the scene where Connelly plummets down a shaft filled with gnarled hands that paw at her; it may be unintentional, but it looks a lot like a vertical variation on the climactic hallucination from Roman Polanski‘s sexual repression epic, Repulsion. Which, of course, brings us right back to the most curious element of the film: Bowie’s ambiguous role as a libidinous villain, who the heroine both hates and desires. The Goblin King Jareth represents both the young girl’s seductive childish fantasies and her slowly-stirring real-world sexual desire. Heck, one minute Bowie the sexy goblin is basically taking the girl to her fantasy dress-up prom, and in the next he’s trying to woo her back into a state of pre-erotic childhood whimsy by shapeshifting into a grandma gnome and plying her with plushies from her toddler days. The symbolism of Bowie’s character changes almost as often as a 14-year old’s mood swings, bu that’s actually the perfect accompaniment to a movie which simultaneously expresses nostalgia for childhood together with a resolve to move forward into the world of adult responsibility. It’s something everyone whose gone through adolescence can identify with, and Henson’s decision to leave the tape off his heroine’s bosom allows his fairy tale to blossom.

Besides “Sesame Street” and “the Muppets” honcho Henson, Labyrinth saw contributions from a host of talents. George Lucas was the executive producer. Terry Jones (from Monty Python) wrote the original screenplay (although the final shooting script was changed quite a bit, with input from Lucas among others). Illustrator Brian Froud, who designed the sets for Jim Henson for Dark Crystal, again worked in the art and costume departments on this film—and loaned his infant son Toby to play the stolen child.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…has stood the test of time… it’s still a wild, weird, spooky little world in there.”–Stephen Rea, The Philadelphia Inquirer (2007 re-release)

(This movie was nominated for review by “TVO.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

“If you didn’t care for Tree of Life then genetically you are not a human being.”–Tim Heidecker (via Twitter)

DIRECTED BY: Terrence Malick

FEATURING: Brad Pitt, Hunter McCracken, Jessica Chastain, Sean Penn

PLOT:  A couple learns about the death of one of their three sons.  Then, a flashback covers events from the birth of the universe to the birth of the couple’s first son, Jack.  A series of impressionistic scenes show Jack growing up in a small Texas town, afraid of the stern father who wants to toughen him up to face life’s trials.

BACKGROUND:

• The Tree of Life may be a partial reworking of Q, a discarded Malick script from the 1970s, which was said to involve “a Minotaur, sleeping in the water, and he dreams about the evolution of the universe…“
• Producer Grant Hill recalls that when he first saw Terrence Malick’s original script for The Tree of Life, it was “a long document that included photographs, bits of material from his research, paintings, references to pieces of music.  It was like something I’d never seen or even heard of before.”
• Special photographic effects supervisor Douglas Trumbull had worked on 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Blade Runner (1982).  He came out of retirement to work on this film at Malick’s request.
• Won the Palme D’or at Cannes in 2011 and was voted “best film” in Sight & Sound‘s 2011 poll.
• After some theatergoers asked for their money back after screenings of the movie, the Avon Theater in Stamford, Connecticut put up a poster reading, in part: “We would like to remind patrons that THE TREE OF LIFE is a uniquely visionary and deeply philosophical film from an auteur director.  It does not follow a traditional linear narrative approach to storytelling. We encourage patrons to read up on the film before choosing to see it, and for those electing to attend, please go in with an opened mind and know that the Avon has a NO-REFUND policy once you have purchased a ticket to see one of our films.”
• A shorter version of the film, featuring expanded versions of the birth of the universe sequences, is planned for a separate release as an IMAX documentary at a later date.
• Our original July 5, 2011 review rated The Tree of Life a “Must See,” but demurred that the film was not quite weird enough to merit a place on the List.  Readers disagreed, and in the 2nd Reader’s Choice Poll they voted Malick’s masterpiece be promoted to a List Candidate.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Thanks to its cosmic visuals, The Tree of Life is compared to 2001: A Space Odyssey more often than any other movie.  That should tip you off that selecting a single indelible image is no easy task.  I could cheat and include the entire twenty minute birth of the universe montage.  I could select my personal favorite image: the child in a flooded, womb-like bedroom who swims out the window to be born as a teddy bear floats in the amniotic brine.  But I believe we will be forced to anoint the “gracious dinosaur” scene as the film’s most unforgettable gambit.  It’s Malick’s “chaos reigns” moment, the juncture at which you either get out of your seat and leave the theater, or experience your first weirdgasm of the evening.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  Sometimes, when you spend your cinematic time immersed in the

Original trailer for The Tree of Life

surrealistic worlds of David Lynch and Alejandro Jodorowsky, it’s easy to forget how uncompromisingly radical and bizarre a film like The Tree of Life appears to someone whose idea of an “out there” movie is of Cowboys and Aliens.  In our initial assessment of Malick’s grandiose God picture, we concluded that “surrealism is only used as an occasional accent here; overall, the mood is more accurately described as ‘poetic’ rather than ‘weird’” while acknowledging that “[a]ny movie that tells the story of a suburban Texas boy’s troubled relationship with his father—but uses a dramatic encounter between dinosaurs to illustrate its main point—is at least making a nod towards the bizarre.”  In the months since that initial review, however, The Tree of Life‘s empyrean strangeness has continued to impress us as 2011′s best weird work.  The clincher came when co-star Sean Penn complained to the French press, “A clearer and more conventional narrative would have helped the film without, in my opinion, lessening its beauty and its impact. Frankly, I’m still trying to figure out what I’m doing there and what I was supposed to add in that context! What’s more, Terry himself never managed to explain it to me clearly.”  That’s all the endorsement we need: when a movie is too weird for its own Hollywood stars, we have to accept that it’s just weird enough for us.

COMMENTS:  A boy’s tempestuous relationship with Brad the Father is used as a metaphor for nothing less than the turmoil between man and his Maker in Terrence Malick’s moon shot of a movie.  Told mostly as a series of hazy, dreamlike domestic memories, Tree‘s primary mission is to explore Jack O’Brien’s tempestuous relationship with his domineering father (significantly, Brad Pitt’s character is only referred to in the film as “Mr.” O’Brien).  Scenes of young Jack frolicking in the spray of a DDT truck with his two brothers alternate with memories of his father trying to teach the boy to fight by popping pop in the face, and these may be followed by a shot of Sean Penn as grown-up Jack wandering in a desert dressed in a three-piece suit.  Confusing things further, Jack’s reminiscences frequently drift into childhood fantasies: an ominous tall man stoops in a chapel-shaped attic.  When the boy first encounters the facts of death, he imagines his mother as Snow White encased in a glass coffin in the forest.  His own birth is depicted as a child swimming out of a flooded bedroom.  And the movie takes time out not only for these flights of fancy, but also to visit the birth of the universe and the afterlife.

The Tree of Life branches in many directions, but there’s always a method to Malick’s madness.  The film begins with a quote from the Book of Job: God’s terse, non-responsive reply to Job’s complaints about his ill-treatment at the hands of his Maker: “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?”  After laying out the film’s main thesis, that “there are two ways through life—the way of nature, and the way of grace”, Malick gives Mr. and Mrs. O’Brien a good reason to complain to God: he kills their child, Jack’s brother.  After scenes of the grown-up Jack looking melancholy and lost (which are peppered throughout the entire movie), the story returns to the aftermath of that devastating death as mother Jessica Chastain asks , “Lord, why?  Where were you?”  In the most audacious cinematic answer imaginable, Malick then literally shows us the laying of the foundations of the earth: the formation of nebulae, the birth of stars, molten lava boiling, all merging into visions of the dance of cellular mitosis as the Tree of Life begins to form, a twenty minute bravura sequence ending in Jack’s birth.  As is the rest of the narrative, the scenes of life’s gestation and birth are accompanied by the heavenly choral and symphonic sacred music of Bach, Taverner, Smetana, Mahler, and a host of others; history’s most glorious music written by man to express his wonder at creation.  It is impossible not to be awed by the splendor of the universe Malick lays out before us, and it’s impossible not to be impressed by his brashness in recreating the cosmos for our benefit.

These events occupy the first third of the film, which then settles down into relative normality–considering it features the occasional unexplained shot of an ethereal Chastain floating in midair.  A central conflict soon emerges between headstrong Jack and stern disciplinarian Mr. O’Brien, who insists his son always address him as “father,” forbidding the overly familiar “daddy.”  As a boy’s mischief—tying a frog to a rocket, throwing stones through windows—develops into a dim childish awareness of sin, Brad Pitt’s Father becomes increasingly harsh towards the boy.  Family dinners turn into uncomfortable trials for the three sons, who sit in silence and answer tersely, afraid of accidentally saying something their father will perceive as disrespectful.  When Mr. O’Brien takes a business trip and is out of town for a week, it’s a holiday for the children, who spend the days blissfully romping through their Texas house with mom Chastain, playfully spraying her with a hose.  She is the embodiment of parental love, the counterbalance to Pitt’s implacable fatherly discipline.

With its “two ways through life” slogan, Tree explicitly posits Mother Chastain as the representative of Grace (love), and Father Pitt as the image of Nature (meaning, the struggle, the need to fight one’s way through life).  Pitt tells Jack, “if you want to succeed, you can’t be too good!” and “it takes fierce will to get ahead in this world.”  He teaches him to work hard, and to fight, and he’s disappointed when Jack can’t bring himself to punch Father in the face.  But his fatherly love for Jack is clear, and Jack returns that affection, if only reluctantly.  Pitt’s turn as Mr. O’Brien is the film’s preeminent performance.  Hunter McCracken does well enough as young Jack, but not much is asked of him in the acting department; Chastain is an angelic presence, but her character is one-dimensional.  Sean Penn isn’t onscreen enough, and has too little dialogue, to make a terrific impression.  Pitt is really the only complex, fully rounded character in the film, and the most fascinating both by default and by design.  He exudes toughness, but it’s tough love; his hardness stems from personal bitterness and disappointment, and from his desire for better for his children.  A talented pianist with a love for Brahms, O’Brien forsook music for a career as an engineer, and always regretted it.  He patented numerous inventions but never cashed in on them, and he envies his rich, successful neighbors bitterly.  He nearly saved a neighbor boy from drowning, but ultimately couldn’t resuscitate the lad.   As formal and authoritarian as he may be, O’Brien’s good motives and good heart are never in doubt, and Pitt makes him into a sympathetic figure instead of a mere tyrant.

The fullness of Mr. O’Brien’s character and characterization belies a simplistic Chastain=grace=good, Pitt=nature=bad equation, suggesting a second layer of Christian symbolism.  Much as the characters in Tree of Life protest to God, whose ultimate plan they can’t understand, foolish young Jack complains about his Father, not understanding that the trials Pitt puts him through are meant to make him grow as a man.  This vision fits with the traditional Old Testament image of God the Father as the loving disciplinarian, and mirrors the Job story that begins the movie (and which recurs halfway through in a sermon by the town priest on the arbitrariness of earthly justice).   In this view, Chastain’s loving mother is a feminine Christ figure, the intercessor between the judgmental Father and sinful man.  And this typology helps explain why, though we are put in young Jack’s shoes, we don’t instinctively take his side against his father; instead, we view their strained relationship as a tragedy, and yearn to see them reconciled.

That reconciliation comes in the film’s final sequence which reunites us with Penn as the elder Jack, the resentful little boy now turned into a doubtful and accusatory adult, walks through a door frame hanging in desert space onto a beach of souls where his loved ones are gathered.  It’s an ending that, in its heartrending hopefulness, is every bit as much a gamble as the cosmic sequences.  You may not agree with Tree of Life‘s religious message, but you have to admire the sincerity and passionate intensity with which Malick delivers it.  He leaves nothing on the table; he can’t be accused of stopping short of heaven.  Considering the pandering, preachy crud that passes as “inspirational” cinema these days, it’s a miracle to see a thoughtful spiritual movie that gives doubt its due, and isn’t self-servingly made to elicit “hallelujahs!” from the pious choir.  Like it or not, agree with the message or not, Tree of Life is a challenging, audacious, experimental and surpassingly beautiful work of cinema, and you’ll be better for having encountered it.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…an exploratory, often mystifying 138-minute tone poem that will test any Malick non-fan’s patience for whispery voiceover and flights of lyrical abstraction.”–Justin Chang, Variety (Cannes screening)

“…[a] mad and magnificent film… a rebuke to realism…there are the baffling and bizarre symphonic passages of non-narrative spectacle, prehistoric jungles, arid deserts, galaxies and spiral shapes – Kubrickian landscapes of wonder. Weirdest of all is the engorged river in which a wounded dinosaur lies prostrate…”–Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian (Cannes screening)

“…a beautiful, messy film: at times lyrical, intimate, and uplifting; at others, vast, inscrutable, and maddening.”–Christopher Orr, The Atlantic (contemporaneous)

OFFICIAL SITE:

Fox Searchlight – The Tree of Life – News stories from the film, links, and numerous supplemental video featurettes

The Tree of Life | Two Ways Through Life – A multimedia site featuring short clips from the film

IMDB LINK: The Tree of Life (2011)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

The Tree of Life | Film | The Guardian – The Guardian shows a serious Tree of Life obsession, cataloging no less than 37 articles and reviews from its pages that reference the film (including interviews with Jessica Chastain and Brad Pitt )

Brad Pitt’s ‘Tree of Life’ Sets Off Mixed Frenzy of Boos, Applause (Cannes 2011) – Hollywood Reporter account on the initially mixed reactions to the movie at Cannes

Giving VFX Birth to Tree of Life – Insight into the creation of the visual effects from the birth of the universe sequence, from Animation World Network

The Front Row: Sean Penn vs. Terrence Malick – The New Yorker‘s Richard Brody takes actor Penn to task for his comments to Le Figaro about The Tree of Life (to be fair to Penn, the report omits the actor’s qualifying statement, “it’s a film I recommend, as long as you go in without any preconceived ideas.”)

Capsule: The Tree of Life (2011) – This site’s initial capsule review of the film

DVD INFO: The Tree of Life has not yet been issued separately on DVD.  It is currently only available in a Blu-ray/DVD/digital copy combo pack (buy).  The Blu-ray disc contains the trailer and “Exploring the Tree of Life,” a thirty minute documentary, as the only extras; the DVD is completely bare.  The film is also available On Demand (rent on-demand).

FEATURING:  Jeong-Myeong Cheon, Hee-soon Park, Shim Eun-Kyung, Eun Won-Jae

PLOT:  Eun-Soo, a young man whose girlfriend has just told him she is pregnant, crashes his

car on a lonely road and finds himself rescued by a young girl, who leads him to a strange cottage hidden in the depths of  a dense forest.  The family living there tend his wounds and put him to bed.  His gratitude soon turns to fear, as the “parents” disappear and he is left in charge of three children who have no intention of letting him leave.

WHY IT’S ON THE BORDERLINE: Much as I love this film I doubt it makes the final cut.  Yes, it’s odd, beautiful and moving, but it could stand more ruthless editing, something it shares with the director’s previous Antarctic Journal.  The storyline is predictable in parts, especially if you’ve seen a number of “bad seed” films.  The style makes it stand out but, honestly, some of the weird scares seem to be a little misplaced.  Hansel and Gretel‘s weirdness seems tattooed on rather than bred in the bone.

COMMENTS: Watching Hansel and Gretel is like settling down to enjoy a nice cup of tea and a fondant fancy, only to discover that your cake is crawling with ants.  The set design is fascinating; wherever you look there is some odd detail  that catches the eye.  The color palette is lush, just the green of the woods is breathtaking.  The score is beautiful, composed by Byung-Woo Lee, who also composed the music for the sublime Tale Of Two Sisters.

In short this is a quality production, clearly made with love.  What prevents it from quite firing on all cylinders is the plot, which is a little predictable.  Sinister children with dangerous powers are something of a staple of the science-fiction and horror genres, and anyone who’s seen or read a few such stories will be fairly confident about where this is headed.  From the moment Eun-Soo sets foot in the fairy tale cottage where every day is Christmas Day and the decor makes your retinas bleed, our suspicions are roused.  They’re all but confirmed by the behavior of the “parents”.  Their rictus grins and desperate eyes scream that something is rotten in the state of Denmark.  They handle their “son” as if he’s a box of sweaty gelignite and it soon becomes apparent that he possesses the same destructive power.

When the “parents” disappear, Eun-Soo is left in charge.  Desperate to leave, but loathe to abandon the children, he shows himself to be kind and protective towards them.   There’s a real sense of how trapped he is.  The dense forest repels every attempt to navigate an escape.  The normal rules of time and space do not apply, and we learn that this strangeness extends to the attic of the cottage as well.

Our odd little family unit are soon joined by another couple rescued from car trouble on that suspiciously unsafe stretch of road.  The appallingly creepy Deacon Byun and his cold faced wife quickly size up the unprotected children and the piles of expensive knickknacks and trouble begins to brew.

Before the story is over we’ll have seen terrible violence, suggested cannibalism, women trapped in trees and a doorway in the forest that leads to a child’s library of fear and frustrated hope.  The shocks and scares of Hansel and Gretel are fairly predictable, but there are moments of dreamy weirdness that stay with you long after, such as the little wooden angel taking flight as Eun-Soo tells a fairy story.  What sticks in the mind about this film though isn’t really the “what the hell!” moments, it’s the exploration of family relationships.

Eun-Soo was on the phone to his pregnant girlfriend when he crashed.  She was berating him for not being there when she needed him.  Later he tells a story to the two female children, a thinly disguised tale of his own life.  Distanced from his girlfriend, estranged from his dying mother, he seems to be a man struggling to maintain relationships.  During his week with the children though he grows as a man, becoming a kind, brave protector and genuinely growing to love them.  Tragically, it’s this very personal growth that makes him unable to consider staying.  Eun-Soo longs to return to his world and become a good father to his unborn child.

There is a real thread of melancholy in this tale.  Certainly the children commit acts of awful cruelty, but a disturbing flashback reveals that they are really only behaving as their terrible past has taught them.  In particular, the elder girl shows why she began to play the role of conciliator, and it’s a truly sickening revelation.  Even after acquiring their powers the children still yearn for an adult to care for them, to protect them, to show them love.  Time and again they are frustrated and betrayed by the grown ups they meet.  When they do eventually find someone up to the task they realize that they have to let him go so that he can be a father to his own child back in his own world.

Twice, the elder girl asks whether children are always happy in Eun-Soo’s world.  The second time is during the melancholy epilogue when the question seems addressed to us, the audience.  The answer sadly is no, they are not.  It’s this question, rather than the giant stuffed rabbits and mystery meat in the fridge, that comes back to haunt me days after viewing Hansel and Gretel.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Pic’s mix of horror, humor and surreality doesn’t bother being faithful to the titular fairy tale, though its nerve-jangling narrative of three kids left in a weird old house without proper guidance has dark magic to spare.”–Rob Nelson, Variety (contemporaneous)

DIRECTED BY:  Spike Jonze

FEATURING: Max Records, voices of James Gandolfini, Lauren Ambrose, Catherine O’Hara

PLOT: A troubled, rambunctious boy travels to a land where wild beasts anoint him

their king, but discovers that socialization is a struggle even in his imagination.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  Jonze slips a couple of odd visions into this ersatz kiddie fare; watch for the giant dog on the horizon, the friendly stoning of a few owls in flight, and a surprising limb-rending scene.  The director fills the frame with scattered cuddly monsters of childhood psychology, but there’s not enough of the fantastically irrational here to justify a weird rating.

COMMENTS:  It’s been only a few weeks since Where the Wild Things Are‘s release, and the movie already comes with its own critical cliche: this isn’t a children’s movie, it’s a movie about childhood.  Like most cliches, there’s truth in the observation, and I have empirical evidence to back it up: I saw the film in the company of a 9 and an 11 year old, and they found it boring.  As a boy, I would have found it boring too; there’s not much narrative thrust to the film, and its conflicts are complicated and interpersonal.  To a kid, the tale itself is a mundane series of playground antics played out in an exotic setting—Max and his monster pals build a fort, engage in a dirt clod war, and favoritism and hurt feelings take over until someone decides to take their ball and go home—not a magical adventure they can get lost in.  They’ll take some delight in beasts themselves, who are attractive and tactile with surprisingly expressive CGI faces, Muppets from the id.  But the complex childhood psychology, while fascinating to nostalgic adults, will go right over their heads, the omnipresent womb imagery won’t make a dent in their little psyches, and the melancholy moral about accepting one’s limitations will be hard to absorb.  Each of the wild things Max encounters in his flight of fantasy represents some childhood preoccupation of his, and although it’s easy to see connections between the individual beasties and his real life, the symbolism is complex and mixed-up, just the way a real child’s dreams would be.  There isn’t a simple one-to-one correspondence between each beast and a real life character.  Carol, who’s creative (and, like our hero, intensely destructive whenever he feels his creativity is being impinged upon), is Max’s main alter ego, but Carol also seems to represent Max’s absent father.  KW, who is drifting away from the family unit to make new friends of her own, is simultaneously Max’s teenage sister and his mom, who has a new boyfriend.  Other wild things represent various facets of childhood experience—there’s a goatlike being who complains he’s constantly being ignored, and the cynical horned woman who champions the defeatist voice inside us all.  Getting along with these competing aspects of himself proves as difficult to Max as getting along with playmates and family in the real world.  It ends as a sort of Jungian tragedy, as Max fails to integrate and harmonize the competing aspects of himself.  The closest thing to an epiphany Max achieves is his disillusionment when he abdicates, admitting he’s been lying to these beasts he sought to rule.  He’s not a king, or even a great explorer: “I’m just Max.”  “Well, that’s not very much, is it?” shoots back his disappointed monster alter-ego, Carol, who longed for a monarch to bring order to their disintegrating fantasyland.  Max has no answer to this self-riposte.  His only solace is that he has a lifetime left to devise a comeback.

The grapevine says that Warner Brothers pressured Jonze to do some serious reshooting after his initial, even darker cut had tykes in tears at test screenings.  It will be interesting to see if the inevitable director’s cut delivers something even more idiosyncratic and uncompromising, maybe even a tad weird.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Max’s dilemma and emotions are distilled to their essence, so the way his real-life suffering informs his dreamscapes becomes unmistakable… more than just a visual feast; it’s a blissful evocation of imagining as a process of spiritual maturation.”–Ed Gonzalez, Slant Magazine

DIRECTED BY:  Guillermo del Toro

FEATURING: Ivana Baquero, Sergi López, Maribel Verdú, Doug Jones, Álex Angulo

PLOT:  While blood trickles backwards from the ground into a prone girl’s nostril, a voiceover tells of a princess of the Underworld who escaped to the mortal realm and forgot her divinity.  We then meet Ofelia, an eleven-year old girl who is traveling with her pregnant mother to stay with her new stepfather, a brutal Captain in the employ of the dictator Franco, who is hunting the Communist/Republican resistance hiding in the forest around a Spanish mill.  With her mother’s difficult pregnancy and the cruel Captain’s indifference to her needs, Ofelia’s life becomes intolerable, until she is visited by a faun who promises to restore her to her rightful place as an immortal fairy princess if she can complete three tasks.

BACKGROUND:

• Despite the English language title, the faun in the movie is not the Greek nature god Pan.
• Pan’s Labyrinth is intended as a “companion piece” to del Toro’s 2001 ghost story The Devil’s Backbone, which also features the experiences of an imaginative child during the Spanish Civil War.
• Del Toro has tended to alternate making artistic, genre-tinged, Spanish language movies with smarter-than-usual big budget Hollywood fantasy projects.  He followed the innovative Mexican vampire movie Cronos (1993) with Mimic (1997), and the psychological ghost story The Devil’s Backbone [El Espinazo del Diablo] (2001) with Blade II (2002) and Hellboy (2004), before returning to his Latin roots in 2006 with El Laberinto del Fauno.  Since then he has made Hellboy II: The Golden Army and is slated to direct the upcoming live-action version of The Hobbit.  If he holds true to form, we can expect another daring Spanish language film to follow his Tolkien adaptation.
• Pan’s Labyrinth was in competition for the Golden Palm at Cannes, but the fantasy lost to Ken Loach’s Irish troubles drama The Wind That Shakes the Barley.  It was also nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards, but lost to the German Communist-era drama The Lives of Others.
• Despite not winning any major awards, eight top critics—including Roger Ebert, Richard Corliss and Mark Kermode—selected El Laberinto del Fauno as the best film of 2006.  With a 98% positive ranking, Metacrtitic considers it the second best reviewed film of 2006 (trailing only Army of Shadows, a lost 1969 Italian classic re-released in the United States in 2006).
• Perhaps the most gratifying praise the movie received was a reported 22 minutes of applause from the Cannes audience.

INDELIBLE IMAGE:  The Pale Man, murderer of children, who sits eternally in front of an uneaten banquet with his eyeballs lying on a golden plate in front of him.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  Pan’s Labyrinth is the textbook example of the rule that

Original (and somewhat misleading) trailer for Pan’s Labyrinth

the better a movie is, the less weird it has to be to make the List of the 366 Best Weird Movies of all time.  On one level, by blending a realistic wartime drama with a fairy tale that could almost be viewed as a conventional fantasy, the movie could be seen as merely novel, rather than weird.  The way that Ofelia’s “fantasy” terrors bleed into and ominously echo the real world horrors of Franco’s Spain creates a sort of a weird resonance even when we are lodged in the “real” plot.  The film is also suffused with weirdness’ close cousin, ambiguity, in that it never proves the realm of fairies and fauns to be a phantasmagoria; the evidence is deliberately conflicting on whether these wonders are all in Ofelia’s  head or not.  The film is filled with masterful, memorable, visionary images, such as the moving mandrake root that resembles a woody baby and the giant toad that coughs out its own innards, though such marvels might be glimpsed briefly in a regulation fantasy films.  Those elements are enough to nudge Pan’s Labyrinth from a mainstream fantasy in the direction of the surreal, but it’s the nightmare centerpiece with the Pale Man that tips Pan‘s scales into the weird.

COMMENTS:  You can have brilliant cinematography, masterful acting, awe-inspiring spectacle, and evocative music—and Pan’s Labyrinth has all of these—but you can’t create a classic without a great, emotionally engaging story to tell.  Although del Toro insists that he tells his stories primarily through images, it’s Pan’s Labyrinth‘s tight, simple, elegant script that delivers a tale that immediately feels timeless.  When we think back on the movie, the visions of the praying mantis turning into a fairy before our eyes, the Toad imploding and turning itself inside out, or the Pale Man glaring through the eyeballs in his palms as he chases Ofelia through the darkened vaulted corridors may come to mind first; but we also remember Captain Vidal’s brutal execution of an innocent man with a bottle, the Doctor’s calm defiance as he turns his back on Vidal’s drawn pistol and walks slowly away to his fate, and Ofelia’s heartbreakingly naive pleas to her unborn brother not to hurt their mother.  Pan’s Labyrinth appeals equally to our love of escapism and to our need to be grounded in this flawed world, to our sense of childlike wonder and to the bittersweet wisdom of adulthood, and holds those opposing impulses together in a delightful tension.  Good stories require conflict, and although there are mesmerizing conflicts here between Ofelia and the Captain, and between the Fascists and the rebels, the most involving conflict in this story is the one between fantasy and reality.

Structurally, there are two stories here, the tale of the quests the faun requires Ofelia to undertake to prove her fey pedigree, and a wartime drama in post-Civil War Spain.  Taken out of context, the “real” story—the tale of fascist Captain Vidal’s tyrannical rule over his own household, as well as the populace he lords himself over—could seem lightweight and cliched.  Though brilliantly realized by Sergi López, the captain is a stock sadist with no redeeming characteristics whatsoever.  He exists solely for the audience to hate.  Mercedes, the house manager secretly working with the rebels, the doctor, and the other resistance figures are unconditionally good; they exist solely for the audience to root for.  The rebels haunting the woods are ciphers, sometimes almost mythological creatures; del Toro points out on his commentary track that he even has them materialize out of the forest like ghosts or spirits when they appear.  The storyline moves on a standard emotional track: the Captain is cruel and arrogant, killing innocents and taking an almost sexual delight in torture, the resistance is noble and self-sacrificing. In the end the audience is appeased when evil is cleansed through a viscerally satisfying act of redemptive violence.

But even though the story is a stock one and its characters merely types, it never rings false for a moment, and in fact moves us intensely.  The war story itself is a sort of modern, cinematic fairy tale about good triumphing over evil.  That plotline is informed by, and feeds off, the simultaneous telling of Ofelia’s fairy tale, one which follows all the conventions of a story by Grimm.  One of the ironies of the narrative is that, in many ways, Ofelia’s “fantasy” world is more complex and emotionally real than the world that seems to exist outside her head.   The faun, for example, is not a simple cardboard character; he is neither good nor evil.  He is alternately obsequious towards Ofelia (addressing her as “your Highness”) and subtly menacing.  His appearance is simultaneous attractive, almost cute, and uncanny.  He offers Ofelia what seems to be her only hope for happiness and temporarily cures her sick mother, yet in the end he is not to be trusted.  Whereas the ethical choices in the “real” world are cut and dried—it is only a question of whether one has the courage to do what is right—Ofelia is forced to make tougher, more complex decisions in the fairy world.

Fairy tales, especially in their pre-Disneyfied original forms as oral folk legends, appeal to children because their weird magical incidents and clearly defined monsters are easier to understand and accept than the incomprehensible rituals of adulthood.  Children can’t understand the mysteries of sex, the complicated relationships of their parents, and the necessity to compromise principles sometimes just to survive.  Ofelia struggles to understand why her mother submits herself to the horrible Captain, who shows his wife no tenderness and cares only about his unborn son.  The girl senses instinctively that the Captain is evil, but as a protected child she can’t know the extent of his depravity.  On the other hand, she has no difficulty accepting and understanding the pure evil embodied by the Pale Man, the Captain’s fantastic doppelgänger and the weirdest character in Pan’s Labyrinth.

It’s significant that the descent into the Pale Man’s mysterious lair occurs at the exact midpoint of the story; Ofelia’s mixed success in completing her quest inside these nightmare chambers is the pivot on which the rest of her tale will swing.  In terms of tone, this irrational, mythological sequence puts weirdness the center of the tale; it echoes the particular horrors of the war raging outside as a universal, existential horror.  The Pale Man is mysterious beyond just his monstrous appearance, with his bags of loose skin hanging off his skeletal frame, his noseless nostrils, and the detachable eyeballs he wears in the palms of his hands.  The realm he rules over is equally perverse; he sits unseeing before an uneaten banquet, with friezes celebrating his historic child-killings lining the walls, and his eyeballs lying on a gold plate in front of him.  Chillingly, a pile of shoes sits in a corner.  And while Ofelia is in his kingdom, she is in a kind of trance.  The irrational and contradictory rules in this realm.  Ofelia’s fairy companions deliberately mislead her for inscrutable reasons, but her intuition proves true; soon after, her instinct betrays her while she ignores the fairies’ accurate warnings.  The fairy world—which may be all inside Ofelia’s head—is more confused, psychologically deep, and meaningful than the black-and-white conflict between Fascism and principled resistance in the real world.

The Pale Man is a deliberate, distorted mirror image of the Captain.  Not only does his role as devourer of innocents reflect the Captain’s inherent sadism, but the wasteful banquet he presides over reminds us of the extravagant feast Vidal throws for the provincial notables, featuring rabbits he has taken from his victims.  Even more so than the seamless visual wipes Del Toro uses to transition from the real world to the fantasy world, it’s the repetition of fairy tale motifs that recur in the real world that link the two realms in our minds.  Particularly obvious are the connections between Ofelia and Mercedes, her surrogate mother, role model, and Vidal’s chief antagonist.  The faun requires Ofelia to find a key in her first quest; Mercedes steals a key to help the rebels.  Completing her second task wins Ofelia a magical dagger; a desperate Mercedes palms a kitchen knife that will prove crucial later.  In the separate climaxes that conclude the two halves of the movie, both Mercedes and Ofelia will hold the life of another in their hands.  There are a multitude of other parallels sprinkled throughout the film, and although they work only subliminally on a first viewing, it can be a treat to pick them out on a second.  The doctor prescribes two drops of medicine to palliate Ofelia’s mother; the faun prescribes two drops of blood to cure her.  The principled disobedience and sacrifice of the doctor, the emotional highlight of the war story, finds its double during the faun’s final test of Ofelia.  The doubling of images from fairyland into fascist Spain lends a mythic resonance to the simplistic war story.  Del Toro calls these correspondences echoes, but I think of them as stitches; they sew the two stories together into a unified two-headed monster, with the sinister heads of the Captain and the Pale Man springing from a single trunk.

It’s the world of the Captain and Mercedes that involves us emotionally—because we can relate to these real life characters—but it’s Ofelia’s fairyland that astounds and attracts us.  The streamlined world of fairy, with three clear tasks that have to be completed to win the prize and clearly defined moments where a single choice will determine our fate, is far more alluring than the wartime world where battles are fought incrementally and noble gestures can be in vain.  In Pan’s Labyrinth, the real world is simplified so we, the audience, can achieve an easy proxy victory over evil; but because the movie is set during a precise historical tragedy, we should realize that things don’t always work out that way.  The vision of resistance here is itself a wish-fulfillment fairy tale.  If we know our history, we realize that the Allies are never coming to liberate Spain, and the rebels have already lost. Winning the symbolic battle fought in Pan’s Labyrinth can’t change the fact that the Republicans lost the war.  We also know that the Utopian vision of equality espoused by the rebels, and mocked by the Captain, is a pure illusion.  In the best deconstructionist tradition, del Toro raises the question of whether both of the stories aren’t really fairy tales—and the question of whether it might be preferable to view them that way.  Might there be a greater truth in the stories we deliberately mold to guide ourselves than in the accidental realities of history?

In the end, Pan’s Labyrinth never tells us whether the faun is real, and whether Ofelia is really the incarnation of Moanna, immortal princess of the underworld.  Del Toro deliberately provides us with evidence for either position.  Did Ofelia escape from the locked room by drawing a door on the wall with her magical chalk?  Or did someone hear her screams and let her out, off-camera?  Did the mandrake root heal the mother, or is it just coincidence that she got better when it was placed under her bed, and had a miscarriage when it was removed?  Can the Captain not see the faun because it is only in Ofelia’s imagination, or because it is invisible to everyone but fellow immortals?  Does the fairy world exist eternally alongside our world, or does it die with Ofelia?  Some will feel compelled to take a strong position on one side or the other, and debate the contradictory evidence endlessly on message boards.   Others will see the beauty inherent in the ambiguous construction.  Del Toro is forcing us to choose, to take a position on whether the Other World is real or imaginary.  One choice leads to great beauty and hope of something beyond.  On the other side is death, and acceptance that we are all doomed.  The director’s commentary reveals that Del Toro believes the magic was real.  But he’s not didactic, and he doesn’t demand anyone come to the same conclusion.  The choice is up to us.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“If you recall the chills that ran down your spine and the surreal humor that tickled your brain in the presence of ‘Alice in Wonderland,’ ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ or ‘The Wizard of Oz’ when you were a child (or, later, in the nightmarish dream-films of Luis Bunuel, Jean Cocteau, F.W. Murnau or David Cronenberg), you’ll discover those sensations once again, buried deep in the heart of ‘Pan’s Labyrinth.’”–Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun Times (contemporaneous)

“Guillermo del Toro’s films do not starve for creatures of baroque ingenuity, and Pan’s Labyrinth, the vividly aestheticized tale of a young girl’s journey through the gothic rabbit hole of her imagination, is cluttered with insects that morph into faeries, a faun who gatekeeps an unknown dimension, a large toad with a secret in its volatile tummy, and a merciless monster with eyes in the palms of its hands… Del Toro is smart but he’s no theoretician, and though he takes aim at fascism, his vision is scarcely surreal; though prone to sensualist shocks, his comic-con aesthetic is so tidy and discreetly alluring Buñuel might have called it bourgeois.”–Ed Gonzalez, Slant Magazine(contemporaneous)

“A fairy tale not even remotely intended for children, this entrancing magical-realist drama concocts a sinister spin on ‘Alice in Wonderland’ against the war-torn backdrop of 1940s Spain, shifting between two worlds with striking craft and discipline…  Del Toro’s taste for matter-of-fact surrealism inevitably means that some of the story’s metaphorical and mythological underpinnings remain elusive, though for the most part the story’s flow is so relentless that explanations feel almost unnecessary.”–Justin Chang, Variety (contemporaneous)

OFFICIAL SITES:

Pan’s Labyrinth – The official site won a “Webby” award for Best Movie Site of 2007.  Contains numerous stills, trailers, downloadable icons and wallpapers, and a Web version of del Toro’s sketchbooks for the film.

MySpace – Pan’s Labyrinth – the movie’s official MySapce page

IMDB LINK: El laberinto del fauno (2006)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Girl Interrupted – Mark Kermode’s reverent piece from Sight & Sound about Pan’s Labyrinth, containing enough quotes from del Toro that the director should have been credited as the co-writer

Escaping Into the Real – excellent, insightful criticism from Timothy Miller on Pan’s Labyrinth‘s ambiguous attitude towards escapism

Pan’s Labyrinth at the Guillermo del Toro Fansite – Pan’s Labyrinth quotes and links from the director’s fansite

Pan’s Labyrinth – this monograph on the film by Paul Julian Smith, professor of Spanish at Cambridge University, appears to be unpublished and may be unfinished, but contains some noteworthy observations

American Cinematographer: Fear and Fantasy – extensive discussion of the visual strategy of the film, incorporating quotes from Director of Photography Guillermo Navarro

Doug Jones – the Making of a Fantasy – archive of behind the scenes images and videos of the makeup and special effects work by DDT Efectos Especiales for the film, courtesy of Doug Jones’ website

Interview: Sergi Lopez on Pan’s Labyrinth – quotes from Lopez, who played the Captain, on his character and on working with del Toro

DVD INFO:  With no featurette included (only trailers), New Line’s 1 disc edition (buy) could be considered a little light on extras.  The interactive DVD-ROM features can be cool, but you have to have a PC (no Mac’s allowed) and install extra included software to access them.  If your system qualifies, you’ll find that you can access the official website and see the same sketchbook information in a custom browser (yippee).  More interesting is the “Interactive Viewing Experience,” which in theory allows you to access the full script, storyboards, stills and concept art at appropriate points as you watch the movie in a small box.  I couldn’t get the video portion to run on two different Windows machines, however, although I could access the script and storyboards separately.

More important than the superficial features, however, is the commentary track from del Toro, which, from the perspective of understanding the creative process, is one of the best ever made.  The director breaks down each scene and justifies nearly every artistic choice he makes in the film; he makes observations that even the most dedicated student would miss without the insights he provides (such as the fact that the two halves of the split tree trunk in Ofelia’s first quest resemble not only the horns of the faun, but also a diagram of the female reproductive system—well I’ll be damned).

The two-disc “Platinum” edition (buy) adds a disc of featurettes: The Power of Myth (on the fairy tale legends that influenced del Toro in constructing the scenario), The Faun and the Fairies (on the creation of the creatures that populate the film), The Color and The Shape (on the film’s use of color), and The Lullaby/Mercedes Lullaby Progression (on the musical theme). There’s also a Director’s Notebook (with sketchbook pages and storyboards that at least partially duplicate those found on the interactive portion of the single DVD); four semi-animated “DVD comics” providing mythical back-stories for the faun, toad, and Pale Man; and Charlie Rose’s 49 minute interview with del Toro and fellow Mexican filmmakers Alfonso Cuarón (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban) and González Iñárritu (Babel).

The Blu-ray disc (buy) collects all the features on the two-disc DVD, adding minor behind-the-scenes footage. It also contains “Enhanced Visual Commentary” which allows the viewer to jump to picture-in-picture video commentary at appropriate points in the film.

(This movie was nominated for review by reader “Anna.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

DIRECTED BY: Terry Gilliam

FEATURING: Craig Warnock, David Rappaport, David Warner, John Cleese, Michael Palin, Shelley Duvall, Sean Connery, Ralph Richardson, Katherine Helmond, Ian Holm

PLOT:  11-year old Kevin is largely ignored by his parents, who are more interested in news about the latest microwave ovens than in encouraging their son’s interest in Greek mythology.  One night, a gang of six dwarfs bursts into his bedroom while fleeing a giant floating head, and Kevin is swept up among them and through an inter-dimensional portal in their scramble to escape.  He finds that the diminutive and incompetent gang is tripping through time robbing historical figures using a map showing holes in the space-time continuum of the universe that they stole from the Supreme Being; things get complicated when Evil devises a plan to lure the bandits into the Time of Legends in order to steal the map for himself.

BACKGROUND:

• Time Bandits is the first movie in what is known as Gilliam’s “Trilogy of Imagination” or “Trilogy of Dreams.”  It deals with the imagination in childhood; the second movie, the bleak Brazil (1985), with adulthood; and the third, Baron Munchausen (1989) with old age.  Gilliam did not intend from the beginning to make three films with similar themes; he only noticed the connection between the three films later, after fans and critics pointed it out.
• Gilliam began the script in an attempt to make something marketable and family-friendly, since he could not find anyone interested in financing his innovative script for Brazil.  The success of the idiosyncratic Time Bandits allowed Gilliam to proceed making imaginative, genre-defying films.
• The film was co-written by Gilliam with his old Monty Python’s Flying Circus mate Micheal Palin, who is responsible for the snappy dialogue.
• Ex-Beatle George Harrison helped finance the film, served as executive producer, and is credited with “songs and additional material” for the movie.  Only one Harrison composition is featured, “Dream Away,” which plays over the closing credits.
• Gilliam shot the entire movie from a low angle to give an impression of a child’s-eye view of the world.
• Sean Connery was not originally intended to appear in the final scene, but was meant to appear in the final showdown with Evil.  The actor’s schedule did not allow him to appear when the battle was being shot, but Connery suggested that he could play a role in the final scene.  His second, quite memorable, role consists of two shots, filmed in an afternoon.
• A low budget release, Gilliam’s film cost about $5 million to make but grossed over $42 million.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: The avenging floating head of God appearing out of a cloud of smoke.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  As an utterly original blend of history, comedy and theology

Original theatrical trailer for Time Bandits

wrapped in Monty Pyhton-eque verbal sparring and presented as a children’s fable, Time Bandits starts with a weird enough design.  As the film continues and the bandits journey from history into myth, the proceedings get more mysterious and existential, until the flick winds up on a shatteringly surreal climax that is bleak enough to supply the most well-adjusted of kiddies with years of nightmares.  As the tagline says, it’s “All the dreams you’ve ever had—and not just the good ones.”

COMMENTS: Sandwiched between the Biblical parody of Life of Brian (1979) and the dystopian weirdness of Brazil (1985), you can almost see Terry Gilliam transitioning from the absurd wit of Monty Python into the dark forest of fairy tale fantasy as Time Bandits progresses.  The film begins as a series of uneven, if often hilarious, sketches based around Napoleon, Robin Hood and the sinking of the Titanic; it ends on a totally fantastic and reflective note, with the child protagonist having met God, and lost his parents.  In between, the boy meets and is adopted by the legendary Greek king Agamemnon, is almost cooked by an ogre and travels by ship perched atop a giant’s head, is captured by giants with cow skull heads and hook hands and placed in a cage hanging over a void within the Fortress of Ultimate Darkness, and witnesses a battle between ultimate Evil facing off against an army of cowboys, Greek archers, a tank, and a spaceship.  Not a bad gig for a kid whose life previous suburban life was dull as prime time television.

Spanning across reality, an absurd version of history, and complete fantasy, Time Bandits is nothing if not ambitious, and as might be expected, the resulting film is cluttered and shambolic.  It’s a movie filled with wonderful moments, marvelous visions and memorable lines that don’t quite cohere into a whole; it seems to lacks a center, flitting between light witty comedy and deep existential despair.  It’s the type of movie that inspires love and loyalty in its defenders, precisely because of its imperfections.

What’s funny about the picture ultimately eclipses what’s wondrous in it, at least from an adult’s perspective.  Time Bandits is intended to work on two levels: as a fantastic adventure for youngsters, and a lightly philosophical and satiric comedy for adults.  Young boys will be enthralled by the rambling adventure, but years later, after the thrill of escaping from an ogre has worn off, it’s the infinitely quotable lines of dialogue like “God isn’t interested in technology…  Look how he spends his time, forty-three species of parrots! Nipples for men!” that will stick in their minds.  Well, lines like that, and the existentially creepy ending.

Time Bandits was marketed based on the bankability of its numerous guest stars. John Cleese, whose role as Robin Hood is nothing more than an extended cameo, gets top billing.  Cleese indeed nails his scene as an unexpectedly effete and detached Hood, exquisitely dressed in snappy green tights amidst a grimy gang of pillaging “Merry Men” in tattered rags.  Looking distracted, he does a meet-and-greet with the bandits, laughing indulgently, punctuating every sentence with “jolly good!” and hardly paying attention to the conversation (“Jolly good!  Four foot one?  Well that is a long time, isn’t it?”)  Other than Cleese, what other cinematic Hood could pull off the line, “Have you met them at all?  The poor?  Oh you must meet them, I’m sure you’ll like them!”  Of all the set pieces, this segment is the most Pythonesque, and not coincidentally it’s one of the film’s most memorable moments.

The other guest stars do well, but are not as memorable as Cleese: one shouldn’t mistake Time Bandits for an all-star comedy revue.  In the time-travelers’ first adventure, they meet Ian Holm, a silly Napoleon with a pronounced Napoleonic complex (“Five foot one and conqueror of Italy! Not bad, huh?”)  He bonds with the dwarfs and their tyke companion because he enjoys towering over them; the joke is amusing, but goes on too long.  Former James Bond Sean Connery is the big name in the cast, but despite his second billing, don’t expect his King Agamemnon to make a huge impression or stretch the star’s range into comedy. Connery plays straight, acting as a heroic, surrogate fantasy-father figure for Kevin.  (The scenes with the half-legendary Agamemnon, who ambiguously slays either a minotaur or a warrior wearing a bull’s head, occur at about the halfway mark and bridge Time Bandits‘ historical and fantasy hemispheres).  Connery also reappears in the denouement in a scene that links Kevin’s fantasy world with the “real” world, adding yet another disquieting element to the already freaky finale.  Also of note are Michael Palin and Shelley Duvall, who appear in multiple scenes across the years as an odd romantic couple whose courtship is eternally doomed to be interrupted by dwarfs falling from the sky.  Their strange, oblique conversations about unstated physical ailments (“No, no, no, I don’t have to wear the ‘special’ anymore”) provide another Pythonesque running gag.

Forgetting the guest stars, its the unselfconscious performance of young Craig Warnock as Kevin (billed 16th) and the cadre of avaricious dwarfs (billed 10th to 15th) that carry the film.  Warnock doesn’t have much to do but to remain sympathetic and stay out of the comedians ways as they rampage across time and space stealing the scenery, and he manages the task admirably.  The ragtag band of renegade little folk, led by the unduly arrogant Randall (David Rappaport), each have idiosyncrasies as shabby as the headgear they’ve pinched from across the eons—an aviator’s hat, a one-horned viking helmet, a colander—but they function as a character unit.  They are greedy, selfish, and more than a bit dim; too slight to be ruffians, they have to survive by their wits, which makes them harmless rather than scurrilous.  They also pull together as a team when push comes to shove, and despite the fact that they are constantly messing up Kevin’s life by snatching him away from the comforts of home, they are also his gateway to a life of adventure. We come to root for them as much as laugh at them.

The protagonists engage our sympathy, but it is villain David Warner, as Evil, who steals the show.  The leader of a band of rapidly diminishing demons (he has a tendency to zap them into oblivion on principle whenever they disrespect his authority, even when he immediately afterward concedes they had a good point), he’s a kid’s cartoon vision of the devil, and he hams the role up wonderfully.  He’s obsessed with technology (which Gilliam here loosely identifies with evil), fascinated by digital watches, computers, and subscriber trunk dialing : “If I were creating the world, I wouldn’t mess about with butterflies and daffodils. I would have started with lasers, eight o’clock, Day One!”  This Evil Genius sets up a game show in his stone lair to trap the greedy dwarfs and steal the map, and he’s capable of blowing himself up like a giant pin cushion to absorb arrows.  He also gets off some of the best lines, in a movie that’s full of quotable dialogue: “Benson, dear Benson, you are so mercifully free of the ravages of intelligence.”

Villains are typically more interesting than heroes, but Evil meets his match in the Supreme Being (an assured Ralph Richardson), who rides in late to save the day and has some memorable lines of his own: “Back to creation. We mustn’t waste any more time. They’ll think I’ve lost control again and put it all down to evolution.”  The Supreme Being wraps up the messy plot, rather too tidily, but he also suddenly introduces some weighty and disturbing philosophical questions into the movie.  All along we’ve been wondering, as suggested by Evil, whether this Supreme Being is imperfect. How could he build a universe full of holes? (“It was a bit of a botched job… we only had seven days to make it,” Randall explains). How could he let the his bumbling underlings steal his precious map, and why couldn’t an omnipotent Being manage to catch up with the incompetent thieves? 

As it turns out, it was all part of an elaborate, frustratingly oblique plan. “Why do we have to have Evil?” Kevin dares ask the Creator, with childlike impertinence.  “I think it has something to do with free will,” answers the Supreme Being, evasively.  That’s the pat answer to the question of evil, and Richardson delivers it in the offhand manner of a theology professor addressing a bothersome student’s question when his mind is really on what he’s going to have for dinner.  That simplistic solution is undermined by the side conversation between Randall and the Supreme Being.  The dwarf tries to apologize for stealing the map, saying he didn’t mean to.  “Of course you didn’t mean to steal it, I gave it to you, you silly man… I am the Supreme Being, I’m not entirely dim. I let you borrow my map,” replies God, while Randall looks earnestly confused.  This conversation raises the specter of predestination—did the Supreme Being really trick the bandits into stealing the map, to serve his own purposes—as he says, to test his Creation?  At the very least, it implies a more complex scheme of free will than his rote answer to Kevin might suggest; one in which the Supreme Being, creates imperfect helpers and depends on his foreknowledge of their flaws to use them as pawns in an elaborate game he seems to be playing against himself.

That odd, deep, and unresolved bit of theological speculation tacked on to the end of a whimsical kids’ adventure secures Time Bandits‘ weird status.  As powerful as he is, the Supreme Being either can’t, or isn’t willing to, control Evil.  A small bit of concentrated Evil rolls under a tank tread and is forgotten (although with this Supreme Being, you can never chalk these things up to chance).  That chunk of persistent Evil follows Kevin back into the “real” world, where he suddenly wakes to find his home is burning down.  The smoldering remnant of wickedness wreaks a spectacularly mean-spirited revenge on the child, in an epilogue that is stranger and more dreamlike than the actual dream.  The ending is the kind of subversive kiddie cruelty that novelist Roald Dahl used to delight in, but taken to a metaphysical level and given a knifelike surreal edge that comes from Gilliam at his most far-out.  Few of the kids who saw Time Bandits in theaters enjoyed  Gilliam’s mystical, downer ending.  None of them forgot it.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…this surreal adventure fantasy has been conceived as a movie for children and adults… Gilliam has a cacophonous imagination; even the magical incongruities are often cancelled out by the incessant buzz of cleverness. It’s far from a bad movie, but it doesn’t quite click together, either. The director doesn’t shape the material satisfyingly; this may be one of those rare pictures that suffers from a surfeit of good ideas.”–Pauline Kael

“…one of Terry Gilliam’s weirdest and best movies.”–Sam Adams, Philadelphia City Paper (DVD)

“Childhood is a pretty weird time, and children need pretty weird stories to help them navigate it. [Time Bandits] feels like the kind of story you made up at nine or ten; old enough to have a lot of strange things floating around in your psyche but still prepubescent.”–Matthew Dessem, The Criterion Contraption (DVD)

IMDB LINK: Time Bandits (1981)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Time Bandits – Bruce Eder’s essay on Time Bandits for the Criterion Collection edition

Wide Angle / Closeup: Time Bandits – an interview with Gilliam after a 2006 screening of Time Bandits (questions are not limited to this movie, but cover the director’s entire career)

Time Bandits at Dreams (the Terry Gilliam fanzine) – This Terry Gilliam fan site contains a lot of material on the auteur’s more recent films, but only a few paragraphs of background on Time Bandits

Time Bandits II Script review – a synopsis/review of an unproduced script for Time Bandits II by Charles McKeown

DVD INFO: Time Bandits has been released in a single disc edition by The Criterion Collection (buy) with the usual extras: a running commentary from Gilliam, co-writer and actor Michael Palin, and contributions from John Cleese, David Warner, and Craig Warnock.  It also contains the theatrical trailer and a “Time Bandits Scrapbook.”

It’s an unusual case, but many videophiles complain about the picture quality in the Criterion release: some claim the image is inferior and cropped slightly, and all agree that the transfer is not anamorphic (enhanced for display on widescreen televisions).  For this reason, many aficionados recommend the Anchor Bay Special Edition (buy) over the Criterion release.  This two-disc edition lacks the commentary on the Criterion edition, but includes a second disc of special features including the featurette “”The Directors: The Films of Terry Gilliam,” an interview with Gilliam and Palin, theatrical trailer(s), interactive DVD-ROM content, and a Gilliam bio.  It also comes with liner notes and a fold-out “map of the universe” with more info on the production.

Time Bandits is also available from Anchor Bay in a slightly cheaper budget release (buy) with no special features except for the theatrical trailer. At the time of this writing the savings by buying the single-disc version was only $1.

FEATURING:  Elle Fanning, Felicity Huffman, Patricia Clarkson

PLOT:  Adorable, precocious and angst-ridden Phoebe (Fanning) has a psychological

disorder that makes her spit on her classmates and occasionally talk to the Red Queen, among other misbehaviors; she uses her role in the school’s production of “Alice in Wonderland” as self-therapy.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  A few very brief and inorganic Alice in Wonderland hallucinations do not a weird movie make.  (In the film’s defense, it’s not trying to be weird, at all).

COMMENTS:  Phoebe in Wonderland is definitely an actor’s movie.  While the plot introduces us to some interesting, quirky characters—enigmatic drama-school weirdo and free-spirit Miss Dodger; conflicted mom Hilary, who loves her child dearly while resenting the fact that caring for her has overtaken her life; and of course Phoebe, who desperately wants to be a normal but can’t control her need to ritualistically hop on each stair in a correct order that exists only in her mind—it resolves itself in a disappointing Lifetime-network-feel-good-tearjerker-of-the-week fashion, with only the briefest of detours into Wonderland.  Fortunately, Dakota’s little sis Elle turns out to be every bit the actor her older sibling is, and carries the film on her tiny shoulders, with the adult veterans doing their part to keep up with her.  She evokes a heartbreaking pathos in her desire and inability to be the good little girl her parents can be proud of and her peers accept.  The visions of Wonderland she sometimes sees aren’t magically staged, and in fact make little literal sense: whatever Phoebe’s psychological issues might be, she’s no schizophrenic.  Only once does the intrusion of Alice’s world inside Phoebe’s mind work or make much plot sense: when she sees the rabbit hole yawning in front of her (it’s also the best looking of the fantasy sequences, which are mostly pedestrian and effects-free).  With that single exception, the script should have kept itself firmly on this side of the looking glass.

We go to independent films hoping to see something different than the twenty formula Hollywood movies that are permitted to dominate the United States’ 38,000 movie screens each week.  It’s disappointing to find that, when an independent film does manage to break the major studio stranglehold and get a small release, it turns out to be pretty much the kind of fare Hollywood would have released anyway, if they’d had extra room for another April drama.  Phoebe in Wonderland is just as good as any product released to the cineplexes, perhaps even a cut above in the acting department, but we have to wonder: don’t we deserve at least one screen per metropolitan area dedicated to showing something off the beaten path? 

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The ‘Wonderland’ motif, which could be a really cool framework for the story, is little more than a sparse reference point, and Phoebe’s occasional dalliances in the surreal are more disruptive than not.”–Jamie Tipps, Film Threat

DIRECTED BY: Philip Ridley

FEATURING:  Jeremy Cooper, Viggo Mortensen, Lindsay Duncan

PLOT:  Over-imaginative young Seth, growing up in post-World War II rural USA, comes to believe that his widowed neighbor is actually a vampire.  After his father dies in unexpected fashion, the older brother he adores returns from his military tour of the Pacific.  When the brother falls in love with the vampire widow, Seth tries to find a away to save him.

BACKGROUND:

• This was Philip Ridley’s first directorial effort, after breaking into the movie business by writing the script for The Krays.  He is also an author of children’s books.
• A top-billed, pre-fame Viggo Mortensen had just come off playing the role of the cannibal “Tex” in Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III.
• The production company for the film (Bialystock & Bloom Limited) is jokingly named after Zero Mostel and Gene Hackman’s characters in The Producers.
• This film, with its hyper-imaginative child protagonist roaming among golden fields of wheat, was an obvious inspiration for Terry Gilliam‘s 2005 film Tideland, which has a slightly different atmosphere but can be seen as a companion piece.

INDELIBLE IMAGE:  Seth cradling and asking advice from the petrified baby (which he believes to be an angel) that he found hidden in an egg-like box in a hayloft chapel.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  Nothing that happens in The Reflecting Skin is literally

Original trailer for The Reflecting Skin

impossible.  Much of the film’s bizarre effect comes from the characters, especially the weird widow Dolphin who is obsessed with decay and destruction and whose husband hanged himself after a week of marriage. Other characters who form the background of young Seth Dove’s weird world are his perpetually on the verge of tears, creatively abusive mother; a father who reeks of gasoline and hides a secret past; a drunken neighbor obsessed with his own sinful thoughts who dresses like a Puritan; the world’s unluckiest town sheriff, who has lost three body parts to animal attacks and who wears a slice of a colander for an eyepatch; and a hot-rod hearse full of juvenile delinquents that haunts the back roads of this Midwestern farm community.  Altogether, it’s a such an odd concoction of unlikely ingredients, told in a straightforward dramatic manner, that might earn the label “improbable realism” (as well as “Midwestern Gothic”).

COMMENTS: On it’s release in 1990-1991, The Reflecting Skin was frequently compared to the work of David Lynch, usually unfavorably (although the video box design prominently quotes Roger Ebert as saying he likes The Reflecting Skin better than Lynch).  In 1990, the comparison was inevitable: Blue Velvet was still fresh in critics minds, and Lynch was contemporaneously plowing much the same weird-underbelly-of-middle-America turf in the television series “Twin Peaks.”  In that era “Lynchian” became a virtual synonym for “weird,” a compact way for the critic to describe the tone of the movie.  This lazy Lynch analogy (which replaced the earlier lazy Fellini analogy, and which still raises its head almost anytime a filmmaker ventures outside the strict realist format) is unfortunate.  It hints that Lynch, the then and current face of non-academic film surrealism, invented a weird tradition that existed long before he did.  Further, the analogy suggests that here on out, any director who uses subtly unnerving, bizarre imagery to introduce dark psychological undercurrents into an otherwise realistic story is merely copying Lynch and has no originality or vision of his own.  The comparison sweeps what is unique about The Reflecting Skin under the rug, while simultaneously dismissing it as something only “weird” folks would be interested in.

Ridley’s debut film is clearly reminiscent of Lynch, but the differences reveal more than the similarities.  Ridley’s sense of humor is less flamboyant than Lynch; he also tends to handle his bizarre touches with more subtlety.  Most significantly, for better or worse, The Reflecting Skin has a literary sensibility missing in Lynch.  It feels like a adaptation of an out-there experimental novella.  That’s precisely what we might expect from a first time director whose previous career was as a novelist and playwright.

There are two areas in which Ridley’s novelistic style comes to the forefront.  The first is characterization.  Each of the characters is painstakingly detailed and drawn.  Other than Seth Dove, who’s too young to have much backstory, the major characters all bring a complex history that’s often only hinted at.  The widow Dolphin, most obviously, has her husband’s suicide, but she also carries with her from childhood an unexplained fascination with destruction (she gives Seth advice on new forms of vandalism to try out, and confesses that she loved the bombing of London during the war).  Seth’s mother, Ruth, is clearly unbalanced, and likely clinically depressed; the roots of her misery aren’t clear, but their effect on her is obvious.  Luke Dove, the passive husband and father who spends his days reading pulp novels, has a secret past that will be hinted at, if not fully disclosed, in the course of the movie.  Cameron, the film’s most normal character and therefore the one the viewer is drawn to identify with, has obviously been profoundly affected by what he witnessed on his military tour.  Although he describes the awe and beauty of the nuclear explosions he saw in the “pretty islands” of the Pacific in a wistful (but also very slightly ashamed) voice, there are hints that something more scarring may have happened to him overseas, especially in the way he denies being a hero and casts aside the American flag that Seth greets him in when he returns home.

These main characters have far more depth and are far more interesting than the usual Hollywood cutouts, or even Lynch’s usual caricatures.  Despite their magnified eccentricities, each seems very real.  Unfortunately, a few of the minor characters do fit into the “pointlessly quirky,” ersatz-Lynch stereotype.  Joshua, who dresses like a Pilgrim in a Thanksgiving pageant and is presumably a Mennonite or Quaker, is overplayed by David Longworth.  He chews such massive chunks of scenery in his first appearance, where he is tormented by the suspicion that God has taken his son from him as punishment for his wicked thoughts, that he makes heartbreaking grief seem like a bad joke.  He does better in his second scene, where a prop bottle of whiskey justifies the overacting.  Even worse is Robert Koons’ Sheriff Ticker.  To his character’s implausible backstory and ridiculous trademark eyepatch (with breathing holes poked in it) he adds an odd, geographically uncertain accent and over-enunciates badly in an attempt to give his lines more weight.  Koons appears to view the role as a platform to audition for a “Twin Peaks” spin-off or rip-off.  The acting in the movie as a whole is at best uneven.  The three child actors can be excused for not nailing their parts, but in a movie where most of the other actors deliver naturalistic performances of weird characters, these two minor portrayals break the tone and do evoke Lynch at his most self-indulgent.

The other way in which Ridley differentiates himself from Lynch is in his literary style of symbolism.  At this stage of his career, Lynch used symbols that are either elegant and obvious (Blue Velvet‘s the severed ear buried in the grass of a suburban paradise to represent middle America’s dark buried secrets), or fully surreal and incongruous (Dianne Ladd smearing her face with lipstick in Wild at Heart).  Either way, Lynch’s imagery is largely self-contained within each individual scene.  Ridley uses imagery in a carefully studied manner, making it echo throughout the film, as a good novelist is trained to do.  Consider, for example, the symbol of drinking water.  At one point early on his father tells young Seth, “You should drink, or else you’ll turn to dust.  A man’s got to drink.”  Seth, however, consistently refuses a cup of water, although he is always delighted to fetch some for his pa.  Later, his mother forces the boy to drink obscene amounts of water as a punishment.  Then, when Seth goes to get a drink for his father, he finds their water supply is poisoned by a dead body in the cistern; and even later, he watches his father drink gasoline rather than water.  All of this, of course, connects to and is reminiscent of another strata of symbolism in the movie: the vampire’s need to drink blood to keep from turning into dust.

What this web of symbols all may mean, if anything, is left to the viewer to decide.  The central metaphor of the movie—the “reflecting” skin”—is treated with similar obscurity.  Most obviously, it refers to the unnaturally shiny skin of a baby seen in a photograph, a victim of the Hiroshima bombing.  But skin imagery also recurs throughout other parts of the film: the children are impressed by the skin of the frog they blow up in the first scene, and Dolphin is particularly obsessed with skin, and how it turns into wrinkles.  And “reflecting” brings to mind mirrors, yet another symbol in the film and one that again links to vampire lore. Other layers of images are treated in a similar fashion: sunshine reverberates throughout the film.  So do babies, who are also linked to angels. So do references to sin, particularly to original sin.  Dove is not only the family name, but in one of the weirdest sequences in the film Seth sees a pair of monk-like figures cooing and carrying what appears to be a dead dove.  “Dolphin” lives in a home decorated with nautical knick-knacks.  And of course there is the black car that roams the countryside, a rather obvious, almost literal symbol of death.

What it all may add up to is left unsaid.  Obviously, there is a theme of loss of moral innocence, and also a theme of encroaching age and decay.  But, for the most part, Ridley fills the screen with unresolved metaphors that seethe and boil just below the surface of the narrative.  It is tempting to view The Reflecting Skin, as many critics did, as pretentious twaddle, the work of a director desperate to convince the audience that he has something meaningful to say but who actually has no coherent ideas of his own.  The degree of care with which Ridley peppers the script with consistent recurring imagery, the professional way he utilizes foreshadowing, and the literal sense of the surface narrative, however, belie that interpretation.  Ridley has carefully constructed his exercise in ambiguous meaning; there’s nothing thoughtless or sloppy about it.  The film deliberately points at some truth it finds is beyond its ability to grasp.

The main aspect of the movie that turns audiences off is its relentless pessimism.  In the world of The Reflecting Skin, death seems to be the happiest end to which someone can come.  The alternative is to be pounded by tragedy and loss into a mush of madness, as happens to Ruth, almost happened to Dolphin, and may happen to Cameron.  Each and every character is singled out for a tragic end, and although there is a good bit of gallows humor along the way, most viewers will find the ceaseless negativism hard to bear.  To top it off, the final scene offers zero catharsis, pushing beyond fatalism into the realm of full-bore nihilism.  The scene is also unintentionally ridiculous.  But the howling conclusion is completely characteristic of the movie, which can best be described as full of fascinating ideas and thoughts that are often marred by poor execution.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“… part horror story, part absurdist comedy, mostly pretentious nonsense.”–Vincent Camby, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

“Even with its obvious flaws… there’s something oddly compelling about this weird, weird movie. The Reflecting Skin may befuddle you by what it’s all about, but like a vivid dream, you’ll have a difficult time forgetting it.”–Steve Davis, The Austin Chronicle (contemporaneous)

“A seamless, weirdly conceived and excellently written movie, it is full of sharply observed, poetically linked details, and while some of the direction is uneven, the British Ridley (who is best known as a painter) makes compelling use of landscape; the few houses rise out of the flat, empty wheatfields like stark gravestones.”–TV Guide

IMDB LINK:  The Reflecting Skin (1990)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

At the Movies:  TV film critics Siskel & Ebert view clips and briefly discuss The Reflecting Skin (verdict: one thumbs up, one thumbs down).

DVD INFO:  Surprisingly, given the large number of fans who remember the film fondly and the post-Lord of the Rings popularity of Viggo Mortensen, The Reflecting Skin has never been available on DVD.  There very well may be legal issues regarding the rights. Viewers wishing to see it will have to find an old VHS copy (for example, on E-bay or from Amazon associates) and deal with the full-screen, extras-free version. Those with even rarer audio-visual equipment can try find a copy the 1992 laserdisc issued by Live Home Video (features unknown).  Meanwhile, keep your fingers crossed for a proper DVD release.

(This movie was nominated for review by reader “Bani Sadr.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

DIRECTED BY: Terry Gilliam

FEATURING: Jodelle Ferland, Brendan Fletcher, Jeff Bridges

PLOT:  Jeliza-Rose is a nine year old girl with an active imagination who is being raised by a pair of junkies.  When her father spirits her away to a lonely, dilapidated farmhouse, then takes an extended “vacation” on heroin, Jeliza-Rose is left to her own devices.  She retreats into an intricate fantasy world where her four doll’s heads are her closest companions, but reality is scarcely less bizarre than her imagination: her neighbors are a witch-like one-eyed woman with an unhealthy interest in taxidermy and a childlike mentally retarded man who also lives in his own fantasy world.

BACKGROUND:

• Tideland was adapted from a critically praised novel by Mitch Cullin; ironically, this faithful movie adaptation was critically panned.
• Gilliam made Tideland while on a six month hiatus from directing the big-budget commercial fantasy, The Brothers Grimm (2005).
• Tideland was a commercial disaster, earning less than $100,000 in its initial domestic run.
• According to Gilliam, the French distributor did not want to screen this film at Cannes because there is a scene involving farting, which the French find objectionable.

INDELIBLE IMAGE:  Many will remember Jeliza-Rose’s doll’s heads, who make memorably fantastic appearances in an underwater house and flying about inside a man’s ribcage.  But the more indelible image, because it’s repeated so many times, is the view of the broken down farmhouse in front of amber waves of grain.  The look was inspired by the Andrew Wyeth paining “Christina’s World,” and, though unacknowleged, also from the 1990 film The Reflecting Skin (which had an almost identical look as well as an eerily similarly child protagonist). Gilliam often emphasizes the tall gold grass towering over tiny Jeliza-Rose’s head, as if it were surf and she was living in an undersea world.  This ubiquitous aquatic imagery helps to explain the title “Tideland“.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  Gilliam has described the movie as a cross between “Alice in

Original trailer for Tideland

Wonderland” and Psycho, which sounds weird enough on its own terms.  He pushes the envelope of weirdness even further with his trademark visual flair for phantasmagorical set pieces, for example, with a gloriously imaginative sequences of Jeliza-Rose falling down a rabbit hole full of tumbling syringes.  But even if the audience wasn’t planted firmly inside the skull of the 9-year-old heroine, peering out onto this grotesque world through her child’s eyes, the scenario would have been weird, as the world of Tideland is peopled by grossly exaggerated lowlifes who live out their lives on the lonely fringes of plausibility.

COMMENTS: Tideland is a misunderstood film, which is not automatically the same thing as a great film.  Popular and critical reaction to Terry Gilliam’s movie and the real-world terrors it tosses at it’s 9-year old protagonist was so devastating that the director affixed a defensive disclaimer on the front of the movie stating, “Many of you are not going to like this film…”  He goes on to explain what should have been obvious to every viewer: “This film is seen through the eyes of a child.  If it’s shocking, it’s because it’s innocent.”

It’s a bit surreal that a proper discussion of Tideland must begin by addressing the controversy surrounding the subject matter of the film.  Tideland is about a little girl with addicts for parents, who is abandoned to her own devices and who makes sense of the absurd adult world by using her active imagination to transform it into an equally absurd, but far more colorful and romantic, childhood world.   This outline reads like the basic building blocks of an Important Work of Art.  It’s the kind of story that’s too depressing for massive mainstream consumption, but seems tailor made for the critics.

If the same story had been told as a relatively straightforward drama, it might indeed have been lauded as a brave and incisive work of art (as was Mitch Cullin’s source novel).  But something happens between that one-line thematic blurb and the film that finally appears.  Gilliam places such powerful, grotesque imagery on the screen—although it’s often transformed by Jeliza-Rose’s overwhelming imagination into something innocent and beautiful—that he lost the goodwill of most of the critics.

There’s truth to the notion that some things that work in prose, where the reader’s mind can pick and chose which details to visualize, are too ugly to depict on screen.  This is a criticism I find true of Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, where Hunter S. Thompson’s whimsical and satirical intent is subverted by a literal depiction of puke and debauchery that turns the story into a screed against psychotropic drugs.  But I don’t find this objection to be true of Tideland.  The juxtaposition (more precisely, the co-existence) of the ugly and the beautiful, the jaded and the innocent, is essential to the artistry of this movie.

There are two scenes in particular that send audiences rushing to the exits.  The first is an early scene where Jeliza-Rose cooks heroin for her rock n’ roller daddy, then injects him.  This scene shouldn’t seriously shock anyone, although it should serve notice to those with weak stomachs for human frailties that they may want to select more amiable escapist fare.  In a movie with many bizarre and improbable flourishes, this is one note that rings uniquely true; a junkie father might really assign that task to his daughter, and the daughter would probably treat it as a regular chore, like washing the dishes.  The girl has no adult knowledge or fear of heroin or syringes; it’s simply something she does for her beloved daddy nightly, and the only effect she notices is that papa drifts off into a dream.  Through Jeliza-Rose’s eyes, there’s nothing degraded in her duty; the audience alone supplies that judgement.

The other ”offensive” scene, for those who haven’t been chased away yet, occurs at the very end of the film.  Jeliza-Rose and the developmentally disabled adult Dickens have been developing a tense but sweet pseudo-romance throughout the third act.  This innocent flirtation comes to a deliberately provocative boil near the end of the movie when the ersatz couple’s lovey-dovey kissy-poo games threaten to develop into something unspeakable.  Again, Jeliza-Rose is innocent; she knows nothing of adult sexuality, and imagines that babies come from kissing.  Dickens, who himself has the mind of a 9-year old, is equally blameless.  He has been nothing but playful and chivalrous towards Jeliza-Rose, but we can’t forget that though he’s psychologically a boy, he is biologically an adult male, and he may not be able to control himself or even understand what he is doing if he’s overcome by natural impulses.  Gilliam pushes the inherent ironic tension between the innocence of these characters and the horror of what we fear might, and pray will not, happen as far as he can, building our apprehension to an almost unbearable pitch.  It’s a masterful directorial manipulation in which we are forced to supply the terror the characters cannot, and it’s the one experience that many audiences cannot forgive Gilliam for putting them through.

There’s hypocrisy in that judgement, however.  The scene is provocative, but not exploitative.  It’s not meant to titillate pedophiles in the audience, or thrown out carelessly to shock.  It’s a scene that’s filled with intense human drama (because such a scenario is imaginable) and artistic effect (because of its immiscible blend of purity and sinfulness). By putting two views simultaneously before the viewer, the innocent childish interpretation, and a cynical adult one, the scene is calculated to force the audience to reflect on its own role in creating the drama, not merely to satisfy morbid lust.   Were a director to build up the same sort of Hitchcockian tension using a homicidal stalker and a woman who doesn’t know she was being hunted, audiences wouldn’t bat an eyelash, but would instead delight in the deliciously edgy suspense.  But place a child in the same position, putting the oblivious victim in danger not of her life but of her virtue, and the reaction flips.  We’re jaded to the murder of adults (or sexually mature teenagers), which is standard entertainment in blockbuster thrillers.  Gilliam has found one of our few remaining cinematic taboos to milk, and some people simply believe that this part of human existence must be permanently hidden from view, however honorably the subject is approached.  I disagree.

The one legitimate criticism that arises from this line of thinking is that the child actor’s own innocence might have been compromised by the performance.  It’s a reasonable possibility, but one that again suggests that we’re still projecting our own knowledge of the filthiness of the adult world onto children.  There’s no reason that the actress Jodelle Ferland had to understand the mature aspects of the script any more than the character Jeliza-Rose did: in fact, such an understanding might have jeopardized her ability to project the necessary innocence.  It’s doubtful that the director sat her down before scenes and explained to her the horrors of heroin addiction, or the mechanics of adult intercourse, in graphic detail.

The viewer who allows himself to be driven away by Tideland‘s ugliness will miss out on a lot of beauty.  Jodelle Ferland’s performance is wonderful.  She’s as enchanting and adorable as Lewis Carroll’s Alice.  Her performance is heartbreaking, because we recognize sordid circumstances of her life that she can’t see.  Remarkably, Ferland performs no less than five characters: she speaks for and carries on dialogues with her four doll’s heads, each of whom has a different voice and personality, throughout the film.  Brendan Fletcher’s Dickens is also an amazing portrait.  He captures the nervous tics, the strange halting speech and the even stranger preoccupations of the mentally retarded that involuntarily repulse us, but he too is so sweet and innocent that we are won over to his side.  He’s pitch-perfect.  Jeff Bridges’ deranged, notice-no-evil rock and roll junkie, despite being the ultimate unfit parent, is an amiable clown whom we almost like against our will.  He also hits the right note, because it’s necessary that we almost like him: he’s tender and playful enough towards his daughter that we can understand why she dotes on him.

The fantasy sequences are visually sumptuous, especially the underwater centerpiece.  They also are the key to the redemption-through-imagination theme of the film.  When Jeliza-Rose imagines three of her lost doll’s heads flying around happily inside the cathedral-like ribcage of her father, we realize how essential her fantasy world is for her to survive her real-life losses.

The film as a whole is far from perfect, however.  The audacity of Tideland‘s vision is strong enough to buoy it above sea level, but the execution is often questionable.  The real problem with the film is that it’s fairly clear where Jeliza-Rose’s imaginary world ends, and the real world begins, but there is not enough contrast between the two.  Tideland‘s reality is too bizarre.  Jeliza-Rose’s choice is not between reality and fantasy, but between an irrational dream and an irrational nightmare.

There are too many false notes in the “real” world.  Jennifer Tilly’s plays the improbably named “Queen Gunhilda” unrealistically as the ultimate trailer-trash parody.  But the little girl’s casual acceptance of even such a queer mother’s death, her complete lack of bereavement, is so implausible that it leaves a sour steak on her otherwise lollipop-sweet charm.  And the entire character of Dell, who at the same time is every kid’s inner picture of a witch, yet another irresponsible and completely self-absorbed adult, and the single most disturbed exhibit in Tideland‘s menagerie of weirdos, goes a step too far.  It’s no fault of actress Janet McTeel, who plays the role given her well, but Dell is superfluously weird;  it’s just too inconceivable to think that yet another bizarre character could be thrown in our poor waif’s path.  Jeliza-Rose deserved at least one real adult to interact with before the credits started to roll.  A movie that posits two levels of reality should play fair in at least one; reality should be something relatively recognizable, so the fantasy world can provide a legitimate flipside.

The movie also suffers from pacing problems.  It meanders about episodically for almost an hour before recognizing that the friendship between Dickens and Jeliza-Rose is the driving force behind the narrative.  More importantly, the ending is too abrupt.  The heroine is placed in horrible jeopardy, but yanked away to safety at the last possible moment.  Although some plot elements come together at the end, the resolution is rushed, and in the end we feel like we’ve suddenly been awakened from a dream by a frantic alarm.

In his disclaimer to the film, Gilliam advises, “I suggest you try to forget everything you’ve learned as an adult—the things that limit your view of the world.  Your fears, your prejudices, your preconceptions.  Try to rediscover what it was like to be a child, with a sense of wonder, and innocence…”  With all respect to the director, that’s only half the advice he should have given.  To truly appreciate Tideland, to experience all it’s irony and suspense and artistry, you must see it simultaneously through one eye of a child, and one of an adult.  If your childish eye has been stung out by a swarm of bees, like hopeless Dell’s, you may be permanently unable to view Tideland for what it is: both beautiful and disgusting, and flawed like this sinful world itself.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Way too disturbing for kids and too weird for most grown-ups, ‘Tideland’ is likely to wash up in boutique distribution where Gilliam’s name will pull in only his most devoted fan base.”–Leslie Felperin, Variety (contemporaneous)

“…unrestrained inventiveness is both the blessing and the curse of Gilliam’s wack-job of a film, whose anti-conventionality (and anti-commercialism) is a breath of eccentric air even as its narrative and stylistic lack of self-control ultimately results in something of a catastrophe… employing a tsunami of askew camera angles and fish-eye lenses that are less inspired than simply insistent, Gilliam turns his film into a phantasmagoric funhouse bereft of rhythm, basic coherence, and, finally, much in the way of fun.”–Nick Schager, Slant Magazine (contemporaneous)

“…easily one of the most audacious, weird and unapologetically outrageous films I have ever sat through. In certain respects, it is questionable—but I remained intensely engaged as I watched the thing unfold before me.”–Matthew Hayes, Montreal Mirror (contemporaneous)

OFFICIAL SITE: Tideland official site: As of 4/13/10, the location of the former official site has been snatched up by a cybersquatter, who has so far supplied nothing but some text (in German) about the movie.

IMDB LINK:  Tideland (2005)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Dreams: Tideland: The Tideland page at Dreams, the Terry Gilliam fansite; contains numerous interviews with Gilliam, Cullin, and others, and even more links of interest for fans to peruse

Alice in “Nightmareland”: Panel member Sergi Sánchez defends the controversial choice of Tideland as Best Film at the 2005 San Sebastian (Spain) film festival

Stuart Jeffries meets Terry Gilliam:  Guardian piece about Gilliam and Tideland.  Contains an audio link to the 30 minute press conference with Gilliam and Mitch Cullin from which the quotes in the article are taken.

Gilliam, Searching for His Audience:  A Washington Post profile and retrospective of Gilliam’s career with an emphasis on Tideland

Terry Gilliam begs for financing for Tideland on the street:  Youtube clip of the director scrounging for pennies and nickels outside the Comedy Central studios

Tideland, a Terry Gilliam film, Cropped:  A visual demonstration of the cropping of the theatrical image that occurred in the transfer to DVD

DVD INFO:  The only available Region 1 (North American) version is the two disc “collectors edition,” (buy) which features commentary by Gilliam and co-scripter Tony Grisoni, a 45 minute making-of documentary filmed by director and fan Vincenzo Natali (Cube), two shorter mini-docs, 5 minutes of deleted scenes, and interviews with Gilliam and producer Jeremy Thomas.

This release caused a furor among film buffs because the DVD transfer is presented in a 1.77:1 aspect ratio rather than the 2.35:1 ratio shown in theaters (see “Other Links of Interest” above).