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Movie Review: The Ballad of Jack and Rose
By William Sternman
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The Ballad of Jack and Rose
Starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Catherine Keener
Written and Directed by Rebecca Miller
I didn’t understand anything about this movie, starting with Daniel Day-Lewis’ porridge-thick Scottish accent. Every time he opened his mouth, he seemed to be putting his left foot in it.
It’s 1986, see, and Jack (Day-Lewis) is an overage hippie who is still living in his now-deserted commune and still shooting up housing developments that threaten to ruin his pristine wetlands island.
Although the whole idea of forming a commune was to live in almost early Christian simplicity in communion with nature and to reject all the materialist trappings of the corrupt establishment, Jack prefers to live off the fortune his industrialist father left him. (Never let principles stand in the way of convenience.) Give the man his due—he’s a vegetarian and he generates his own electricity with wind towers, but he also tools around the island in a polluting gas-guzzler.
Worst of all, in a quintessential act of selfishness, if not psychological incest, this dying man lives alone with his teenage daughter, Rose (Camilla Belle). After he’s gone, she’ll be left to cope with an outside world she has never been exposed to. (Those narcissistic enough to think they are superior to the rest of mankind often end up taking others down with them.)
One of the tenets of hippiedom was that you could never trust anyone over 30. (It never seemed to occur to them that one day they too might cross over.) Now decidedly over 30, Jack proves the truth of that shibboleth. A survivor of the tell-it-like-it-is generation, Jack failed to tell Rose he’s been having an affair in town with the mother (Catherine Keener) of two grown boys (Ryan McDonald, Paul Dano). Without preparing his daughter, he brings them all home to live with him and Rose. It’s an experiment, he explains. (So was Harry Harlow’s cloth-mother demonstration, but at least a few of the monkeys got something of value out of it.)
Hippie flower power finally comes into its own in a house burning that reminded me of nothing so much as an Indian sati with a hint, perhaps, of Vietnam War Buddhist-monk self-immolation thrown in for good measure. Frankly, my only concern was that the resident copperhead (don’t ask; I’ve been sworn to secrecy) got out alive.
In a two-years-later coda, we see Rose working happily in the flower shop of a straight-arrow friend who had previously refused to give into her request to teach her how to kiss because he wasn’t romantically attracted to her. Jason Lee is charming in the part, but he isn’t the same quirky guy I remember from Chasing Amy.
I guess this happy ending is supposed to send us out of the theater humming the scenery or something, but die-hard Freudian that I am, I didn’t believe it for a minute. Not after that suck-face kiss.
Despite soundtrack over-reinforcement by the likes of Bob Dylan, I just couldn’t buy into this paean to New Age individualism. (A movie really ought to be able to stand on its own two feet without gratuitous and involuntary endorsements from period icons.) None of the characters really comes to life as a full-blown (several puns intended here) person, except, oddly enough, McDonald, who unlike Dano, is only interested in doing Rose’s hair. There are hints of complexity, self-awareness and vulnerability here that make him intriguing as well as believable.
Beau Bridges, as the developer, is set up to be the straw-man villain of the piece, but in the face-off between him and Day-Lewis he comes off as more reasonable, if less idealistic.
Writer-director Rebecca Miller is the daughter of playwright Arthur Miller as well as Day-Lewis's wife. The father did much better by his second wife, Marilyn Monroe (not Rebecca's mother), with his screenplay for her last movie, The Misfits, than the daughter has done by her husband with this off-key ballad. Maybe it doesn't run in the family after all.
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William Sternman's short stories have been published in England, Hungary, Pakistan, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and Japan, as well as the U.S. His book and movie reviews have appeared in Audience, Films in Review, Bestsellers, The Drummer, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Houston Chronicle, The Boston Herald, The St. Petersburg Times and www.movie-vault.com. He has been a volunteer tutor at the Center for Literacy since 1998. He received a fellowship grant in literature from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.
© 2005 Me Three