The Ballad of Jack and Rose | | Cast : | Daniel Day-Lewis, Camilla Belle, Catherine Keener | | Director : | Rebecca Miller | | Studio : | Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer | | Format : | Color, Closed-captioned, Widescreen | | Released Date : | , 2005 | | DVD Released Date : | August 16, 2005 | | Language : | English (Dubbed), English (Subtitled), Spanish (Subtitled) | | Audience Rating : | R (Restricted) | | | BUY THIS DVD FROM AMAZON |
Customer Reviews
| Rating |  | | Date | April 24, 2005 | | Summary | "You're innocent, and innocent people get hurt" | Content
 | 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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| Rating | | | Date | April 16, 2005 | | Summary | Good acting but sad and depressing coming of age story | Content
| Starring Daniel Day-Lewis as Jack, this recent Indie film is very ambitious. It's set in 1986 in a former commune off the coast of New England. Once there were 60 people living there, with hippie hopes and dreams. But that was sixteen years before. Now there are just two people left - Jack and his 16-year old daughter, Rose, played by Camilla Belle. This father-daughter combo live their lonely lives in the midst of natural beauty and no modern conveniences. There's a deep bond between them. But Jack is ill. He has a heart condition and not long to live. We can see it from his skeletal shape and the cave-in look of his features.
Out of concern for his daughter, he invites a local woman named Kathleen with whom he has been having an affair, to come live with him. He even pays her money to do this. She moves in with her two teenage sons. One is a chubby and gay. The other has a sense of feral evil about him. They are shocked by the lack of modern conveniences but Kathleen is determined to make it work.
What follows is a sad and somewhat warped look at the coming of age sexuality of Rose and an inevitable crisis that brings all the twisted emotions to the surface. More than anything this film is a mood piece. And the mood is one of despair, longing and unhappiness.
Daniel Day-Lewis is an exceptionally talented actor and his is wonderful in this role as are all the other actors. The cinematography is good too. It's just the script that is too long and too weird. I guess it got its point across though. I left the theater thoroughly depressed. See this at your own risk but I can't recommend it.
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| Rating | | | Date | April 15, 2005 | | Summary | 'Jack and Rose' has mood, but falls flat | Content
| Heavy on atmosphere as well as heavy-handed symbolism, "The Ballad of Jack and Rose" is an absorbing but strangely unconvincing new film by Rebecca Miller. Worst of all, it lacks a coherent narrative and strong dialogue as well, enough to sink a lesser work. To its credit, "Ballad" borrows the isolated atmosphere of Jane Campion's beautiful "The Piano." Yet Miller (the daughter of the late playwright Arthur Miller) fails to capture that film's warm humanity and believability, instead falling for a series of cliched and absurdly conceived plot twists.
At its best, "Ballad" is gorgeously and sensitively filmed by acclaimed cinematographer Ellen Kuras. The film's setting, an island off the coast of New England, lends itself to continual shots of surprising beauty. Miller expertly creates evocative moments out of graceful and fluid visuals, unanticipated but effective editing choices and a masterful use of music (Bob Dylan, Creedence Clearwater Revival and Nina Simone among others). But Miller's obvious plot overpowers these mesmerizing attributes about half an hour into the film.
The film stars Daniel Day-Lewis, the brilliant method actor -- and Miller's husband -- who acts here in only his second film in eight years. He plays Jack Slavin, an ex-hippie who's the only remaining member of a commune founded in the '60s. Jack, whose wife long ago abandoned him, lives in isolation with his young daughter Rose (the promising Camilla Belle), with no connection to the outside world besides occasional visits to the mainland.
Jack is a difficult character -- at once hypocritical and elitist (he insults and threatens real estate developers) -- and Day-Lewis nails him in all his complexities with effortless skill. Jack's health issues (he suffered a heart attack several years earlier) provide a constantly ominous threat that complicates their life together.
It is apparent early in the film that Rose's relationship with her father is unusual, if not outright disturbed. Rose, who was taken out of school at 11 and barely has had any human contact since then (not even television), latches onto her father with both filial and apparently sexual love. Her near-incestuous obsession leads her to repeatedly declare her intention to commit suicide when he dies, a promise that captures the film's dire moroseness. To Belle's credit, she is largely convincing in this ever-difficult role, though she occasionally exaggerates in the more emotionally fraught scenes.
On the other hand, Catherine Keener -- who plays Jack's lover Kathleen -- is outright melodramatic, detracting painfully from the film. "Ballad" takes a terrible turn when she moves into Jack's home, along with her teenage sons, in order to take care of the increasingly sick man. Kathleen's boys provide Rose with her first contact with people her own age, introducing her to sex, drugs and other temptations. As expected, she lashes out against the woman who rapidly takes her place as the object of her father's affections, and the results are nearly disastrous.
The heavy-handed themes of forbidden love, lust, temptation and innocence come to full fruition in the second half of the film, and Miller isn't stingy with the religious imagery. Rose's first sexual experience occurs on her bed as a snake slithers underneath. Kathleen, who is explicitly referred to as a "savior" early in the movie, obviously turns into a temptress who corrupts Jack and Rose's relationship. Miller even uses a storm -- destroying Rose's tree house, an annoyingly overt symbol of her innocence -- to signal the watershed moment when Kathleen and her children interrupt the calm of Jack and Rose's lives.
In addition to her penchant for vulgar symbolism, Miller's dialogue is often hackneyed, obvious and at worst pretentious. And the inconceivable plot twists at the film's climax, involving Kathleen and her children, violently alienates the audience. A chase scene involving the snake is even unintentionally amusing, disrupting the mood of the film. Given the wonderfully reflective and atmospheric tone of the film, the amount of action Miller tries to cram into its end unnecessarily weighs it down.
Despite these gripes, there is a great deal to like about "The Ballad of Jack and Rose." Miller is a talented director, and her pacing and visuals are perpetually superb. With the help of Day-Lewis' quiet intensity and Belle's star-making turn, she creates an engrossing world populated by two complex and believable characters with wonderful chemistry. If Miller had made the central narrative of her film less busy and more convincing, "Ballad" could have been a genuinely deep and profoundly affecting film.
(Originally published in the Yale Daily News, April 15, 2005.) |
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