‘The Ballad of Jack and Rose’

Daniel Day-Lewis infuses his character in this coming-of-age story with customary intensity, charisma and tormented sensitivity.

By: Elise Nakhnikian

"image"
Daniel Day-Lewis (left) and Camilla Belle star in The Ballad of Jack and Rose.


   Writer-director Rebecca Miller’s first two movies — Angela and Personal Velocity — illuminated the conflicted inner lives of girls and young women. Her latest script began with the same aim, conceived as the second part of a coming-of-age trilogy that started with Angela. But this story of a 16-year-old "wild child" is told at least as much from her father’s point of view.
   Jack (Daniel Day-Lewis) and Rose (Camilla Belle) live on a secluded island, on the site of a commune that Jack co-founded before Rose was born. Everyone else in the commune — including Rose’s mother — left years ago. Only Jack, an ideologue so rigid he sees nothing wrong with threatening to kill a real estate developer whose project he disapproves of, refused to give up his ’60s-era ideals or "corrupt" his daughter by rejoining mainstream society.
   The two live in a private idyll, as coordinated as a pair of synchronized swimmers as they move through their daily routines. They’re blissfully self-sufficient — and not just economically. Sitting quietly on their couch, his legs resting comfortably in her lap as Rose does the assignment he’s home-schooling her on, Jack beams adoringly at his daughter. He looks, as she later puts it, like "the happiest man in the whole wild world." The only shadow on the horizon is his bad heart, which he thinks will kill him soon.
   But paradise is lost just a few minutes into the film when a moment of affection almost turns into a romantic kiss. Realizing that his love for his daughter has edged over the line into incest, and that he needs to break the hermetic seal over their lives, Jack scurries to the mainland and asks his sometime girlfriend, Kathleen (Catherine Keener), to move in with them. She quickly obliges, toting a U-Haul packed with all her possessions, her two teenage sons and a patched-together but perennially hopeful heart. But Rose sees nothing wrong with the new turn her love for her father has taken, having been raised to scorn convention. She’s furious at having been "replaced" by Kathleen and does all she can to get rid of her.
   It’s a horrendous situation, and it’s all Jack’s fault. And yet, unlike the bad husband in the first segment of Personal Velocity, Jack is no one-dimensional bad guy. His horror at what he has done and his attempts to put things right make him, as Miller puts it, "monstrous and completely loveable at the same time."
   Miller told Fresh Air’s Terry Gross that her interest in Jack’s point of view and her sympathy for his predicament grew after she became a parent (she and Day-Lewis, who are married, have two young sons). "The love of a parent for a child is oceanic, endless, and kind of bottomless… a love that has all loves inside of it," she said. "It feels like being in love; it feels like protective love; it feels like every kind of love." But the main reason Jack commands so much of our sympathy is the masterful actor who plays him. Miller admits in the production notes that she skewed the movie more toward her husband’s character as she and her editor reviewed footage of his performance, although she was still thinking of it as "primarily Rose’s story" at that point.
   And who could blame her? Day-Lewis infuses the character with his customary intensity, charisma and tormented sensitivity. He also transformed himself physically for the role, dropping about 50 pounds from an already slight frame to capture the look of a man weakened by heart failure. He seems to get paler as the movie progresses; a shot of his bruised and bony naked back toward the end looks positively cadaverous.
   If Jack’s experience is indelibly etched, Rose’s feelings and fate are less clear. Belle’s open face and deep-set eyes convey the girl’s ruthless innocence and her growing sense of power, and she poignantly conveys Rose’s distress at the thought of losing her father, both to heart disease and to another woman. But the movie’s central question of how Rose’s all-consuming relationship with her father warps her subsequent life, especially her relationships with other men, hangs unanswered. Maybe Miller is saving that for part three of her trilogy, but leaving it out of this movie makes it feel unbalanced.
   The writer/director does better by some of the minor characters, eliciting vivid performances from a gifted cast. Keener, who usually plays sharp-edged, sharp-tongued urban women, is painfully fragile and masochistic as Kathleen, a woman so desperate for love that she’ll abase herself and betray her children in hopes of finding it. And everyone’s favorite character, Kathleen’s son Rodney, is perfectly embodied by Ryan McDonald. Fat, funny, rueful Rodney, who is based on Miller’s best friend growing up, provides a kind of running commentary on the other characters, saying the things that need to be said with humor and kindness.
   The sexual politics are also refreshingly realistic, a welcome break from the middle-aged male fantasies we’ve grown to expect from the movies. Rose’s campaign to get herself deflowered, for instance, reminded me of Bertolucci’s Stealing Beauty. But where every man who got within 500 feet of Liv Tyler’s Lolita in that movie seemed eager to unburden her of her virginity, the first two Rose approaches are wise enough to be flabbergasted rather than flattered — and sensitive enough to turn her down.
   Unfortunately, for every gem like Rodney’s awkward retreat before Rose’s relentless advance, there’s a leaden cliché, like the poisonous snake Rose brings into the house after Kathleen has moved in.
   A movie that manages to humanize the struggles of a man who’s fighting to resist his lust for his own daughter should be a memorable and disturbing character study. Instead, The Ballad of Jack and Rose feels more like a master class in acting, one-sided and undermined by a sometimes heavy-handed script.
Rated R. Contains language, sexual content and some drug material.