March 25, 2005

A 60's Holdout and His Daughter, Searching for an Epic

he Jack of all trades in the new film "The Ballad of Jack and Rose," played by the brilliant actor Daniel Day-Lewis, is no ordinary man. A proud survivor of the 1960's and its utopian promise, Jack lives alone on an island with his only daughter, Rose (Camilla Belle), a doe-eyed beauty with the milky skin and ruby lips of a fairy-tale heroine. Shrunk to near-skeletal size, his bones poking right angles through his clothes, Jack suffers from two heart conditions. One will soon put him six feet under. But before that, the other may send the terminal outsider and his daughter down the path of disaster, though one shaped more by the tao of Oprah and Dr. Phil than the tragedy of Lear and Cordelia.

The film opens in 1986 with the image of richly hued red flowers seemingly bopping to the music flooding the soundtrack, Screamin' Jay Hawkins's singularly creepy song, "I Put a Spell on You." This first version is by Creedence Clearwater Revival and is all growls and lugubriously plodding beats. Sometime later, after Jack and Rose are on the emotional outs and neck-deep in melodrama, we hear the song again, only this time the voice prowling the soundtrack belongs to Nina Simone, a singer whose unhurried phrasing and heat bring the song to a slow boil. By this point in the story, Jack has invited a woman, his sometimes lover, Kathleen (Catherine Keener), to move in with him, an invitation that sends his daughter reeling.

A story about the limits of love, "The Ballad of Jack and Rose" is also about the limits of idealism. Written and directed by Rebecca Miller, the wife of Mr. Day-Lewis and a daughter of Arthur Miller, the film summons up both a time and a worldview as distant as the Port Huron Statement, a founding document of the New Left. Once upon a time, Jack and some like-minded souls, including Rose's long-gone mother, hoped to live in communion with one another and with the natural world. The second goal turned out to be easier than the first and, over time, the other commune members drifted back into the outside world. These days, Jack alone lights the house with windmill power while Rose collects seaweed to use as fertilizer in the garden.

Bathed in gauzy light (the great cinematographer Ellen Kuras is behind the camera), Jack and Rose make a handsome if unsettling couple for reasons that become apparent shortly after the film begins. At first, it's hard to pinpoint what is amiss. There is something faintly off about how steadily Rose fixes her father in her gaze, a look that seems to come from years of adoration rather than anxiety about his health. And there is something peculiar, too, about their harmonious isolation. It isn't just that the two have shut out the world; it's that the world has abandoned them. Across the island, a developer (Beau Bridges) has built homes, incurring Jack's wrath. But outside of this interloper, the daily grind - the world of bummer National Public Radio broadcasts, of government busybodies and trash-littered shores - is mostly absent.

Jack's sickness forces an unwelcome dose of reality into this charmed scene. He invites Kathleen to take up residence with them, ostensibly so she can play mother to him and his daughter. An opportunist in tight jeans, Kathleen has two teenage sons (by two different men), the scowling Thaddius (Paul Dano), a boy with a face like a blade, and the neurasthenic Rodney (Ryan McDonald), whose padded body suggests a cozy refuge. When this family of three moves into Jack and Rose's house, they bring a load of baggage (teenage hormones, salted wounds) and, in time, a castaway in search of a berth, played by an excellent Jena Malone. These interlopers leave sticky fingerprints all over paradise. Too bad they don't blow it to smithereens.

Love is strange, and some love, like that between Jack and Rose, is stranger still. But in "The Ballad of Jack and Rose," it's also unbelievable because Ms. Miller is too smitten with the idea of this impossible love to make her characters ring true. The full measure of Jack's wrongs, what his convictions have done to his daughter and how they have shaped their life together, doesn't emerge until late in the film. But even then it remains unclear whether Ms. Miller fully appreciates just how loathsome a creature Jack is, the damage he's wrought. The filmmaker wants Jack to be a sacred monster, but sacred monsters are the stuff of myth, of fairy tales and of ballads. Ms. Miller wants to have her mythopoetic conceit and her hurting, feeling flesh-and-blood people, too; in the end, she has neither.

Painfully thin, Mr. Day-Lewis lost a considerable amount of weight for the role and has the caved-in look of a man hollowed out by disease or disappointment, maybe both. Even in such diminished form, though, the actor overwhelms the screen, which poses a problem not only for his female co-stars, neither of whom has enough to work with, but also for his director. "The Ballad of Jack and Rose" is the third feature from the restlessly ambitious Ms. Miller, whose earlier films were "Angela" and "Personal Velocity." With this one, Ms. Miller has attempted to elevate a small Oedipal story about two damaged souls into a grandiloquent epic, Shakespeare by way of Bob Dylan. She misses by a significantly wide mark, largely because she loves her monster too much and his victim too little.

"The Ballad of Jack and Rose" is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has some disturbing violence, drug use, strong adult themes and language.

'The Ballad of Jack and Rose'

Opens today in New York and Los Angeles.

Written and directed by Rebecca Miller; director of photography, Ellen Kuras; edited by Sabine Hoffman; production designer, Mark Ricker; produced by Lemore Syvan; released by IFC Films. Running time: 112 minutes. This film is rated R.

WITH: Daniel Day-Lewis (Jack Slavin), Camilla Belle (Rose Slavin), Catherine Keener (Kathleen), Paul Dano (Thaddius), Ryan McDonald (Rodney), Jena Malone (Red Berry), Jason Lee (Gray) and Beau Bridges (Marty Rance).