The Ballad of Jack & Rose Movie Review:


It's sheer coincidence, but a nice dovetailing, that this film comes out close on the firestorm of Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus’ essay, “The Death of Environmentalism.” Man and daughter’s losing battle for land and sense of place, an idealism not “extinct but it’s rare,” is meant to adumbrate much more in “The Ballad of Jack & Rose,” but multiple resonances, hints and loose ends doom the effort, the family of two and its cause.

The writing began in 1993, with two characters who would also figure three years later in writer-director Rebecca Miller’s first firm, “Angela.” Shifted from an original upstate New York to some unspecified island off the East Coast -- filmed, in Super-16 for camera maneuverability, on Canada’s Maritime Province Prince Edward Island -- “ballad” or simple “air” (song) in its straightforward narrative, score heavy on ‘60s guitar and Bob Dylan (with one odd shift from CCR’s cover to Nina Simone’s bluesy “I Put a Spell on You”), it harks back to mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth-century communes in the search for anti-industrial Nirvana.

Daughter of Arthur Miller and married to Daniel Day-Lewis, the director did not expect that her husband would take on the part of uncompromising Jack Slavin. But, shedding a requisite fifty pounds, he does what he has to as the Utopian Scot-naturalized-American out of his time, abrasively preserving an idealism abandoned by others and a daughter who knows only the Prospero world he teaches.

They live alone, Jack and sixteen-year-old Rose (Camilla Belle), in an organic house powered by the elements. They are the remnants of the experiment that failed, its defecting communards drifting out of physical labor into middle-class amenities, the girl’s mother apparently too free-loving for Jack, and -- poorly introduced in a few seconds of home movies in the “acid house” -- all perhaps swearing off hallucinogens.

Rawboned Jack is duality itself, capable of threatened and real violence against encroachment, selfishly using a lonely woman in buying her all-round services and subsequently cheque-writing his way out, yet protective and unusually tender with Rose. Tender, in fact, perhaps beyond “nature” in a puzzling father-daughter bed scene, reinforced twice by a fairy-tale ox that rides off with a girl in echoes of Europa, duped by lustful Zeus-as-bull but finally loved and associated with flowers. Flower-man Gray (Jason Lee) is another thread left unwoven, just like a never-removed nylon jacket, a venomous snake in this Eden, and a Viking funeral that misleadingly veers on suttee.

Cookie-cutter houses are rising nearby, and Jack blusters but knows that his staying power is limited by heart trouble, the full prognosis on which he does not divulge. The unstoppable future belongs to paunchy developer Marty Rance (Beau Bridges), with the businessman’s cash mentality but not at heart a bad soul. Seeking help, Jack, too, buys people -- note that he lives largely on an inheritance -- in this case Kathleen (Catherine Keener), a mainland town woman he has dated in his way. Desperate and lonely, she agrees to move to this island with baggage: nice son Rodney (Ryan McDonald), a chubby teen with diabetes in his genes who keeps his windbreaker on and his virginity intact while aspiring to styling women’s hair; and antagonistic Thaddius (Paul Dano), pasty in black above white boots, an adolescent seducer. Later will come the boys’ pregnant-but-not-pregnant friend, a sexually pliant runaway self-reinvented as Red Berry (Jena Malone).

The fireworks begin, including Rose’s acts of resentment, her hormonal awakening, and her getting the incipient hairdresser symbolically to cut her dark tresses.

Faint clues and indirections fly all over the film and, although perhaps unintentional, cry for the clarification which never comes. Everything weighs on increasingly stoop-shouldered father-idealist-lover Jack, but, even with an ultimate “I’m sorry,” the man is not admirable: visionary or holy fool, he is not the person one would choose to live next door to, and a closing three seconds of his legacy lived is not a vindication.



Donald Levit

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