Beyond the Multiplex

"Tideland": Terry Gilliam's blimp crashes amid pointless sadism and cliché Americana
You might think that combining "Alice in Wonderland" with "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" would make an intriguing premise for a midnight movie. Well, I guess. If your problem with the current wave of coldblooded horror movies is that they're insufficiently mean-spirited, let me point you toward Terry Gilliam's "Tideland," the misanthropic nadir of the director's crash-and-burn career.

Sure, I loved "Brazil," and the ill-fated "Adventures of Baron Munchausen" had a genuine visionary madness about it. Those films are two decades in the past, people, and since then Gilliam has vacillated between a roster of never-completed projects, some forays into underwhelming Hollywood tricksterism (sorry, "12 Monkeys" fans, but it's crap) and half-baked sentimentality ("The Fisher King," "The Brothers Grimm").

What's frustrating about "Tideland" is that Gilliam's talent for striking imagery remains intact, but the part of him that always embraced the "grotesque, awful [and] tasteless," to use his own phrase, has driven out everything else. Ooh, Terry, you're edgy, you're an outsider, you've chosen the darkness. We get it. You're also 65 years old, and it's getting tired. This film reminds me of Asia Argento's alarming adaptation of JT LeRoy's "The Heart Is Deceitful in All Things," but without the sheer stupid Eurotrash authenticity that gave that picture some verve.

In "Tideland," a little girl with a stagy Southern accent named Jeliza-Rose (Jodelle Ferland) is abandoned by her abusive junkie parents somewhere in the American heartland, where she has a series of constricted, half-imaginary adventures with her severed doll-heads and a local family of deviants. Her neighbor Dell (Janet McTeer) looks like a witch but practices taxidermy on all manner of formerly living things (yes, to what you're thinking), as well as sex with the delivery boys. Dell's brother, Dickens (Brendan Fletcher), is a lobotomized, stammering half-wit with a few sticks of dynamite under his bed and a lascivious interest in Jeliza-Rose.

I guess "Tideland" does have a certain integrity, in that Jeliza-Rose remains indomitable, no matter how Gothic, disgusting and depressing her situation becomes. But her "adventures" feel like pointless sadism, verging on child abuse, and the fact that she doesn't know enough to be frightened makes it no better. Gilliam's attempts at humor here are moldy stereotypes about the inbred character of Middle America, and the film has nary a gram of human reality or compassion anywhere in it. He's described himself as "old and bitter and curmudgeonly," and I can't put it any better than that.

Opens Oct. 13 at the IFC Center in New York; Oct. 20 in Chicago and Los Angeles; Oct. 27 in Austin, Texas, Boston, San Francisco and Washington; and Nov. 3 in Atlanta, Denver, Minneapolis, Palm Springs, Calif., and San Diego, with more cities to follow.

Fast forward: Inspirational immigration saga "Sweet Land" rises from the plains; "Out of Place" pursues the elusive Edward Said
I'm not going to pretend that Ali Selim's "Sweet Land" is the best movie I've ever seen. It's winsome, sentimental and lovely in a minor-key way. But you can't help rooting for it: Made completely outside the normal production system, this fable of early 20th century immigration is written and directed by the child of much more recent immigrants. If its drama of German and Norwegian newcomers on the plains of southern Minnesota is modest enough, it's also clearly a labor of love.

Elizabeth Reaser and Tim Guinee play Inge and Olaf, strangers in a strange land who meet for the first time in Minnesota around 1920. Inge is Olaf's mail-order bride from Norway, except she turns out to be German instead. Anti-Hun sentiment runs strong in the aftermath of World War I, so they can't get married. But living together, even in total and awkward chastity, makes them the accidental pariahs of their rural community. The story is told both forward and backward, partly through the eyes of their grandson, who inherits their farm in 2004 and must decide whether to sell it to developers and leave all its memories behind. (You get one guess.)

Selim has built a career directing commercials (this is his first feature film) and that leads both to a distinctive confidence and to some overt cuteness. As the sunny, whimsical couple next door with a zillion kids, Alan Cumming and Alex Kingston may make your teeth ache. But Selim's got a fine cast, also featuring John Heard, Ned Beatty and Lois Smith (who plays Inge as an old woman) and even with a sugar level this high, the elegant structure and wonderful wide-open spaces of "Sweet Land" will keep you watching. (Opens Oct. 13 in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minn; Oct. 18 in New York; Oct. 20 in Duluth, Rochester and St. Cloud, Minn.; Oct. 27 in Phoenix and Washington; Nov. 3 in Boston and Fargo, N.D.; Nov. 17 in Dallas, Los Angeles and Palm Springs, Calif.; and Nov. 22 in Chicago, with more cities to follow.)

For a long time, I couldn't tell why Makoto Sato's "Out of Place: Memories of Edward Said" seemed to be spending so much time on subjects of tangential relevance to the late Palestinian-American intellectual who was such a force in cultural and political debate. Sato wanders through a refugee camp in Lebanon where Said almost certainly never set foot, visits an Israeli kibbutz where Said definitely never set foot, converses with an Arab tobacco merchant in a largely Jewish town. If you want a straightforward biography of Said, or a sober assessment of his importance, this isn't it.

But really, Sato's film is a marvelous exploration of the meaning of Said's life, which is the human condition of exile and displacement, as it applies to Palestinians and Jews but also to the rest of us. She visits the house where Said was born in Jerusalem (and where the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber later lived), and others of his homes, in Cairo, Lebanon and New York. She tries to meet real people along the way, wherever she happens to be, who will cast light on his central, and ambiguous, ideas about self and identity. We hear his writing read aloud, but only see him in childhood home movies and photographs. She shows us Said's empty office at Columbia University a couple of times, and it's somehow inexpressibly perfect and sad. By the end, I felt I understood Said far better as a man and a thinker than ever before, in a film haunted by his absence. (Now playing at Anthology Film Archives in New York, with other cities to follow.)

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