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Heist (2001) is a daunting subject for analysis, as is its writer and director David Mamet. It is an example of what I call “semantic screenwriting,” in that it demonstrates that you can put pretty much any nonsensical line into Gene Hackman’s mouth and tell him to spit it back out as if it is the cleverest thing anyone in the room has heard all day, and people will likely assume that it is in fact a juicy bon mot that they just didn’t get.

This kind of writing makes for very pithy quotes, but take it from someone whose favourite pastime is coming up with his own pithy things to say and then saying them to real live people. My experience in this regard, in particular my familiarity with l’esprit de l’escalier, means that the disbelief I must suspend while watching Mamet is doubly heavy. Firstly, no one talks like that, at least not in real time. Secondly, if people did talk like that, the people they were talking to wouldn’t just nod appreciatively. They’d say, “What are you talking about? That makes no sense.”

That the movie works on this semantic level says a lot about Hackman’s talent (and to a lesser degree that of his co-stars Delroy Lindo, Danny DeVito and perennial Mamet favourite and sometime magician Ricky Jay) and Mamet’s audacity, but little else. And it has been a while since I saw the movie, but I recall Mamet also devotes a lot of screen time to characters discussing how hot the Hackman character’s wife is, and if you know as I think most of us do that the actor playing that part is Mamet’s wife Rebecca Pidgeon, those frequent departures tend to grate on the ear after a while. The fact that Pidgeon’s wooden acting makes your average cigar store Indian look like Alan Arkin doesn’t help matters either.

There is however one real gem in there among the head-scratching non sequiturs – e.g. “Everyone wants money… that’s why they call it money” and “My man is so cool, sheep count him” – and I think it must give fiction writers pause, wondering whether Mamet is offering us a glimpse into his own thought processes. Hackman’s character, Joe, is refuting the D.A.’s assessment of him as a “pretty smart fella.”

JOE: Ah, not that smart.
D.A.: If you’re not that smart, how’d you figure it out?
JOE: I tried to imagine a fella smarter than myself. Then I tried to think, “what would he do?”*

My only support for this argument is that I never gave it so much thought as when I began writing fiction myself, and had to come up with the name of a character whose parents are wildly intelligent and creative people (I have yet to come up with one). The problem will worsen when it comes time to put words in all their mouths. I’ll be in Joe’s position, trying to think of what people who are smarter than I would do.

While I’m at it, I’ll try to think of what kind of things people with really interesting lives might get up to, and what kind of things happen to people who experience awe-inspiring, life-altering events.

Wish me luck.

*This is very reminiscent of another famous Mamet tautology. I have yet to track down an interview in which this exchange actually occurs, but in his book Writing in Restaurants he claims, “People always ask me where I get my ideas. I always tell them that I think of them.”

Warning: this post contains some spoilers about the movies Fargo and Raising Arizona. If you haven’t seen these movies yet, go rent them and then come back and continue reading after you’ve watched them. I’ll wait.

Some of you may know that I like to watch a movie now and then. Maybe two or three a week. If somewhere along the line a movie I’m watching gets a little slow, or if I’ve seen it before, or otherwise fails to command my complete attention, I’m likely to start flipping through IMDb for trivia and the like. Which is what I found myself doing while I was watching Fargo this evening.

I’m a fan of the Coen brothers, and count the underrated Miller’s Crossing as one of my all-time favourite movies. So most of what I read on the trivia page for Fargo was familiar to me. Though it never occurred to me in the past to make note of the last item, listed under “Spoilers” (spelling, punctuation and typography preserved):

SPOILER: A total of 7 people were killed (Wade Gustafson, Jean Lundegaard, Carl Showalter, the state trooper the 2 passers-by,and the toll patrol)

Well, wow. That sure is trivial. Even at the end of a long page of trivia, this observation stands out, its factual accuracy cast into sharp relief by its sheer insipidness. And that got me thinking, obviously the IMDb trivia bar is pretty low. I wonder if they’ve published the trivia that I submitted over the holidays yet. And then I checked. They have not.

Yes, this is me on a Friday night: internet movie geek, nursing a grudge against IMDb for not publishing my trivia submissions.

Go watch the 1972 thriller Sleuth, Starring Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine. Then watch the 1982 sci-fi cult classic Blade Runner. Notice any similarities? William Sanderson’s character appears to be living in a futuristic version of Olivier’s drawing room from Sleuth, complete with laughing animatronic toys and board games in mid-play. Though don’t believe Olivier when he says senat is a complicated game. It’s a precursor to backgammon, and pretty easy to pick up.

Now there’s some trivia for you. That’s clearly an homage. And considering how well-scrutinized Blade Runner has become over the 25 years since its original release, I was pretty pleased with myself for being the first to spot it. IMDb was ostensibly less impressed.

Had enough? I didn’t think so. Go watch the 1987 Coen brothers comedy Raising Arizona. Now watch the 2006 remake of the 1973 cult horror flick The Wicker Man. Uh, on second thought, don’t. Unless you really, really want to. But hey, Nicolas Cage stars in both of them. Fascinating, yes? No. I know. But it is a bit interesting that Nicolas Cage picks up a package of diapers off the street from a moving vehicle in the former, and then almost 20 years later reaches down yet again from a moving vehicle to pick up a child’s doll. Now we’re cooking with trivia, my friend – I think the only ones who noticed that connection were me and Nicolas Cage.

Now check out the screenplay credits for Sleuth and The Wicker Man. You’ll notice that the late Anthony Shaffer wrote both (I just blew your mind, didn’t I). Just to be clear, that’s not trivia, that’s coincidence. As is the fact that Sleuth is poised to join The Wicker Man as a remake, this time with Michael Caine in Olivier’s former role, and with the character of Milo Tindle being passed to Jude Law. Law has previously demonstrated his neo-Caine (nuevo-Caine? novo-Caine?) tendencies in a remake of Alfie in 2004, but we won’t be able to fully appraise his performance until someone decides to take a bullet for us and actually watch it.

I think it’s cheating for a filmmaker to tell his audience how to watch his film, what preconceptions to abandon, what kind of perspective to adopt in advance — but rules are implicit in “cheating,” and Terry Gilliam is not a great proponent of rules. In fact, if there are rules covering how to introduce your film at a screening packed with your fans, I doubt they include warning your audience that many of them won’t like the film they’re about to see. But that’s what Gilliam did at a screening of Tideland on October 9th in his cheerful, shambling, deceptively self-effacing way.

Like most of the audience I thought he was talking about someone else when he said that, but somewhere in the middle of Tideland I wasn’t sure. We had been instructed to try to view the film from a child’s perspective, and we had also been given permission to laugh — though I heard more hollow laughs of shock and disbelief than warm chuckles of mirth, and an occasional overloud guffaw of “this must be what he meant when he said the film was funny.”

So I’ll never know how I would have reacted to Tideland if I hadn’t been primed by its director. Even with a warning it’s a difficult film to watch. I saw a couple of people walk out of the small theatre before it was over, which I’m guessing is rare for a Cinematheque audience. Even Geoff Pevere, asking the audience to stay for the Q&A session with Gilliam after the screening, seemed resigned to the expectation that not all of us would make it that far.

It’s unmistakably a Gilliam film and unapologetically his darkest to date, in spite of his insistence that it is about innocence of a child — and not even innocence spoiled, but innocence as an armour that renders a young girl impervious to the horrors of her environment. Gilliam’s films are set in a world where reality and fantasy coexist, where your nightmares burst through your apartment walls (or out of your closet) to carry you away, where your only escape from the impossibility of reality is madness. In Tideland the three most sympathetic characters dream of, and intermittently succeed in, escaping from reality. Jeff Bridges, as aging rocker Noah, dreams of escape to Jutland, but the closest he gets is a nightly “vacation” — an armchair-ride to blissful stupor on heroin that his daughter Jeliza-Rose (Jodelle Ferland) helps administer. Ferland, who delivers the most eerily compelling performance of child as adult since Kirsten Dunst in Interview with the Vampire and renders it all the more spellbinding by carrying almost every scene of the film, portrays a girl who seems desperate to escape to the rabbit-hole world of her favourite book, but whose own imagination creates set-pieces every bit as dreamlike and mercurial as those dreamt by Alice. And Dickens (Brendan Fletcher), a developmentally handicapped young man who Jeliza-Rose befriends after Noah brings her back to his Texas homestead, escapes from the tyranny of his mad taxidermist sister to pilot a submarine across rolling wheatfields.

Also unmistakably Gilliam is the company he keeps in art direction and cinematography. He has claimed responsibility for assembling, rather than creating, the look of his films, notably Brazil, in which the entire 20th century is compressed into a single set. The cluttered interiors of Tideland are grimy and disgusting, but you still want to climb onto the screen and scour through the detritus yourself, to try and piece the graffiti together to discern its deeper meaning. The first look at the inside of Noah’s childhood home is reminiscent of a scene painted by a Tom Waits tune, down to the empty beer bottle on the neglected upright, everything covered in thick sepia dust. The highlight of the exteriors is the Saskatchewan prairie, from the opening shots of grasses swirling in the wind like doll’s hair in a mason jar to expansive shots of trapezoidal sunbleached woodframe houses that would not look amiss in one of Gilliam’s old cut-out animations.

So once we decide that this is not the feel-good movie of the year, but that it’s some kind of artistic endeavour that will be good for us, it’s left for us to wonder what is Gilliam getting at? What’s his point? Does he know? I think maybe he doesn’t, and I’m sorry for not taking advantage of the opportunity to ask him at the Cinematheque screening. If we look at his body of work, we find a lot of protagonists who are fighting against some kind of oppressive authoritarian evil, struggling to prove that their brilliant fantasies, or brilliant madnesses, are not only real, but trump the realities that are imposed upon them. By no coincidence, this is also the plot of The Battle of Brazil: Terry Gilliam v. Universal Pictures in the Fight to the Final Cut, Jack Mathews’ account of, well, I think he covered it after the colon.

But that’s not what Tideland is about, and I don’t think it’s about innocence either. Sure, we have an intelligent, imaginative girl struggling to deal with a dystopian reality, but do purity and imagination win out? Does Jeliza-Rose succeed by superimposing her rapid-cut play-world, where the scenario that doesn’t match is swapped out for another like a Viewmaster slide, over her real-life world of junkie dads and dinners of ant-infested peanut butter?

Maybe Tideland is that bitter medicine, that art that’s supposed to make me a better person. Art is supposed to challenge, and it’s certainly a challenging film. Art is supposed to make you ask questions. And the question I’m asking is why should I tell you to see this movie if I don’t think you’ll actually enjoy it? Well, I think you should support Terry Gilliam and allow him to keep making movies that people may not like. If you really don’t think Tideland is going to do it for you, consider picking up a couple of other Gilliam movies on DVD tonight. And throw in Fulton and Pepe’s Lost in La Mancha, the documentary account of the doomed production of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, another Gilliam project which, if it had ever been committed to film, may well have turned out to be eerily autobiographical.