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(More customer reviews)Those familiar with Rebecca Miller's previous film Personal Velocity, an insightful triptych of three very different young women, will know that she's a director who's on the cutting edge of American independent filmmaking. But with her latest venture The Ballad of Jack and Rose; she seems to have really outdone herself. This astonishingly beautiful and perceptive tale presents, with an astounding veracity, themes of familiaral love, the loss of innocence, and the ultimate costs of idealism in a world where such ideals are no longer relevant or not even particularly welcome.
Boasting some of the best performances of the year, The Ballad of Jack and Rose opens with Jack (a fantastic Daniel Day Lewis) and 16-year-old Rose (Camilla Belle) sharing a tender and intimate embrace while lying on a Garden of Eden-like bed of grass. As they stare up at the wild blue yonder, one gets the sense that they're a complete, contained, and totally contented couple. It's not immediately clear how they are related to each other, but we soon learn that they are a chaste father and daughter. However, the ambiguity of their severely intense relationship quickly becomes unsettling.
It's 1986 and Jack and Rose are living on a remote East Coast island, the only holdovers from a utopian cooperative. Their world is self-sufficient, autonomous, and claustrophobic. They spend their days living off the land, and hiding out in a wooden, rambling shack that is nestled upon a windswept hilltop and over-grown with grass and wildflowers. Jack is originally Scottish, an old hippie, who came to America in the mid-60's carrying with him the hopes and dreams for a country that he thought America would become. An engineer by profession, over the years he has instilled in Rose a fierce intelligence, but also a wariness and distrust of the outside world.
Jack is dying of a bad heart, and he's angry about the world he cannot put in order; he also feels helpless about the beloved daughter who will soon be parentless. Rose feels as though she can't live without him, so when she tells him" When you die, I'm going to die" you know that she means it. Their problems are compounded when a slick land developer (Beau Bridges), who has begun building a lavish, modern subdivision, deliberately endangers the wetlands flanking the edge of Jack's property.
In an effort to get some domestic help and also to introduce Rose to the wider world, Jack invites Kathleen (Catherine Keener), his casual girlfriend from the mainland, and her two sons Thaddius and Rodney (Ryan McDonald and Paul Dano) to move in and assist with the household. But Rose, having been sheltered from influences other than her father, is not pleased to share her world with anyone new.
Rose is gradually becoming a woman, and she doesn't know how to be appropriate around new people. She's particularly upset that Kathleen is sharing her father's bed and dividing his attention. In an effort to get back at her father, she begins to solicit the attentions of Kathleen's boys, and sets in motion a series of events that forces Jack to confront the disorder and disappointment of his life.
Daniel Day Lewis brings total emotional heft to this role, vividly bringing to life the character's whole host of contradictions; it really is a tour-de-force of acting. His portrayal of a disappointed, bitter, but highly intelligent counter-culture type is fiercely earnest and totally empowering. Jack is a man of principle who is caught between his old world beliefs and a world that has long ago left him behind.
Jack is the epitome of a control freak who realizes, too late, that the depth of his devotion may well have poisoned his daughter. Camilla Belle brings to Rose a ferocious sense of the competitive; she's possessive, and potent, a seemingly innocent yet very willful seductress. She lashes out at her father and at Kathleen in a sequence of chaos-inducing maneuvers that can only bring heartbreak to the small collective.
The Ballad of Jack and Rose is a marvelously shaded mood piece that is probably more about issues and characters than it is about story. Miller has a languid, floaty, and wondering directorial style that lends itself well to this type of subject. Rhythmic and dreamy, both Day-Lewis and Belle respond to it all as if gasping in harmony. The film works on numerous levels - it's a statement about environmentalism, it's also a homage to a bygone world, but its mostly an intensely engaging and satisfying drama about a man who has been sidelined by the realities of life, and who could never live up to the ideas inside his head. Mike Leonard April 05.
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