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Snake in the Garden of Melodrama This bizarre and deeply unsettling movie feels like a mess of good intentions, misguided choices and naked talent. It starts out as a seemingly simple portrait of two people in love on an island. Jack and Rose are the Adam and Eve of their perfect reality. The film gets infinitely more complicated when it becomes apparent that Jack is Rose's father, and still more so when we learn that he may be dying and she is unwilling and/or unable to accept the introduction of other people into their insular existence. Director Rebecca Miller, who also wrote the screen-play drops a lot of melodrama and symbolism into her characters and the movie struggles to sustain it all. Jack's love for his daughter seems clearly chaste but Rose, his daughter, is sixteen years old now and her love for him is clearly not, a fact that she may not even fully understand. Jack senses the danger in this as well as his concern for what will happen to his daughter when he is gone. So, he brings his girlfriend, Kathy, who is a secret from Rose, to the island to function as a surrogate mother and Kathy's sons to provide a family. Kathy and her sons bring their own set of neuroses and the mix of issues proves incendiary. On top of all this, Jack is an old hippie making a last stand for the environment against the advance of progress, in the form of Beau Bridges, real-estate developer. It's a lot of plot for a small movie. By the end, the movie-goer is apt to feel claustrophobic, all the various psychoses cutting off the oxygen of the film. Sex, idealism vs. progress, loss of innocence, the dangers of myopia and several other themes find a moment here or there to wrestle their way to the forefront. Symbolism runs rampant and at times borders on comical. On the other hand, Miller and cinematographer Ellen Kuras are adept at creating lovely images that express so much more than words could. The movie is often beautiful and evocative to look at, sometimes unexpectedly so. Jack and Rose's idyllic island is lovingly rendered and it genuinely hurts to see it violated by the encroachment of other people. This is where the movie becomes emotionally complicated for the audience. Why would a man who so meticulously created and nurtured the world he and his daughter live in then turn around and so recklessly destroy it? Part of this of course is that as much as Jack has isolated Rose over the years he's also isolated himself. He has next to no awareness of the consequences of his actions and time and again this proves a devastating flaw. For a man so concerned about the state of the world and the responsibility people have to the earth he himself is hugely irresponsible to the people around him. Likewise, the girlfriend, Kathy (Catherine Keener), seems strangely myopic. She comes to live in a place she's never been before, with a man she doesn't know that well and his daughter whom she's never met. She brings her boys into the same situation and even though a gun is fired in her bedroom, a poisonous snake is let loose in the house, there is obvious, growing tension between her oldest son and Jack and a another violent episode leads to massive injury to her child -- she's still trying to make it work. Huh? It's a testament to Keener's prodigious talent that she is able to wrest some humanity from this unfathomable character. But the performances are the primary strength of the movie and probably the main reason why it is impossible to dismiss as sheer melodrama. Keener is lovely, as she always is and the two boys, played by Paul Dano and Ryan McDonald, also manage to find deep well-springs of reality in their characters. Daniel Day-Lewis is wonderful --again. His ability to inhabit his characters and find their human moments and reveal them to us no matter how alien the character may seem is unparalleled. Day-Lewis's sensitivity and passion reveal Jack as simply another flawed man like us who has never learned to not make some of the bad choices he makes. His strengths as a person are also his ultimate undoing. Camilla Belle is a revelation. The audience watches Rose become a woman before our eyes, before Jack sees it or even Rose herself. There are moments and scenes that she manages to sustain simply with her grace and nuance. She is an actor imbued with mystery and that keeps the audience in a state of wonder. There is, in fact, a lot of beauty in this film. This complicates the experience still further. With snakes and guns and lost virginity and houses being torn down and/or going up in flames you might forget that this is actually an intimate, very personal and heartfelt, little movie. But it is. And at times it's so naked it hurts. At other times though it drowns underneath all the issues it brings up. The ending feels fake in a movie that can spare no false moments and that, along with the melodrama feels ultimately alienating. email this review to a friend
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