What do you do when a filmmaker you like makes a movie you think might be brilliant, but you absolutely despise it? Terry Gilliam's Tideland is, at the least, about a dozen times more imaginative and deeply felt than The Brothers Grimm, which suffered from pervasive plainness. But Tideland is so damned unpleasant, and not necessarily in a "take this trip through the dark so you can appreciate the light" kind of way. It's the story of a pre-teen girl who takes care of her heroin-addicted parents and—through a series of tragedies—winds up living alone in an abandoned house in the middle of a field, where her only company is her collection of severed doll heads and her childlike, brain-damaged adult neighbor. In any other hands, this story and script might've been completely unbearable—one of those indie gothics where human behavior has been rendered completely unrecognizable. It's unrecognizable in Tideland too, but at least Gilliam doesn't try to make the freaks adorable, or stubbornly noble. This is a full-on gallery of grotesques, engaged in behavior that ranges from merely odd to completely disgusting. The movie examines how a child's inner world gets corrupted by her squalid outer world, and Gilliam doesn't spare the squalor. Aside from the hauntingly beautiful final scene, and a moment in the middle where the wheat field becomes an ocean, nearly every flight of fantasy in Tideland is turbulent, jangled and frankly horrifying. No damn fun.
So … what else? Shopgirl has a lot to recommend it. Clare Danes is engaging (if purposefully blank) as a lonely glove department salesclerk, Jason Schwartzmann is funny (if purposefully dim) as the socially inept amplifier salesman who falls for her, and Steve Martin is a compelling cipher as the rich guy who changes both of their lives. There's some arthouse copycatting going on, as director Anand Tucker tries to replicate the twinkly romantic magic of Lost In Translation and Punch Drunk Love, but the steady procession of lyrical interludes gets less special as the movie plays on. And the gender politics of the movie—as in Martin's book, no doubt—are really askew. Martin looks at the methodology of modern love as though it were some alien ritual, reducible to moments: the first date, the first kiss, the first infidelity, and so on. But his characters don't really interact with each other. They just show up at the appointed time and fill their assigned space. This is all intentional, surely. Martin's a dry guy, with a comic sensibility that increasingly fits the absurdism of his early work into the square boxes of everyday life. So the result is a movie that's often distinctive and singularly funny, but is on the whole fairly unsatisfying. Still, say this for Martin: in a lot of the movies he's written, like Roxanne and L.A. Story, he shows a fascination with people who desperately need to be in love, and that passion for passion has a strange poignancy.