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The first word that comes to my mind when I think of Rebecca Miller's THE BALLAD OF JACK AND ROSE is "challenging." This is not an easy movie to describe or to digest. If you're in search of a light evening's entertainment, then keep looking. Miller's real-life husband Daniel Day-Lewis stars as Jack, a man living alone at an abandoned commune in the mid 1980s with his beautiful 16-year-old daughter Rose (the aptly named Camilla Belle). A staunch environmentalist, Jack has cast aside most of the trappings of regular life to raise Rose in an idyllic seaside landscape; however, his life-threatening heart condition and the isolation he shares with his budding daughter have made Jack anxious. He recruits his girlfriend Kathleen (Catherine Keener) and her two sons, Thaddius (Paul Dano) and Rodney (Ryan McDonald) to move in. "It's an experiment," Jack explains to his daughter. Distraught by the intrusion, Rose begins experiments of her own that quickly twist beyond either one's control. At the same time, a land developer (Beau Bridges) is intent on building nearby; Jack has vowed that this will never happen. This film feels partly like a fable, a story on yellowing paper about a free, innocent girl living in her tiny house out in the woods where she befriends animals and ethereal birch trees. But the voyeuristic, always-moving camera gives things a tone of reality and even danger. After Kathleen moves in and shares Jack's bedroom, Rose shows just how angry this makes her in an outburst so violent that the rest of the film has an effective undercurrent of peril. Jack begins to see that Rose isn't merely an extension of himself; if you wonder whether there's anything not purely parent/child about their relationship, then you're on the right track. He's raised her as an idealized hippie child, but by creating his ideal child Jack has also created an ideal woman, a trap he's suddenly acutely aware of. In his second role in 8 years, Day-Lewis shows us that he's still the best there is. He's entirely convincing here, just as he completely inhabited the skin of Bill the Butcher in GANGS OF NEW YORK (2002). (Personally, I'd like to see him play Abraham Lincoln.) Belle is given a difficult role, and is excellent in it – Rose is a beautiful monster of innocence, and Belle holds her own in every scene. THE BALLAD OF JACK AND ROSE is extremely well-written and acted, thought provoking, and well-made; but as noted earlier, it is not an easy film to watch or to like, exactly, but it does what it sets out to do. email this review to a friend
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