Susan Granger’s review of “The Ballad of Jack and Rose” (IFC Films)
When writer/director Rebecca Miller, daughter of playwright Arthur Miller, raids her own life, the results are quite revealing, particularly in this emotionally-charged father-daughter relationship story, revolving around a hippie father who is forced to deal not only with his own mortality but also with his daughter’s coming-of-age as their isolated paradise comes to an end. The story takes place in 1986, when most of the counterculture communes have dispersed. Stubborn, altruistic Jack Slavin (Daniel Day-Lewis) is the last Utopian, living an insular life on an abandoned island commune with his sheltered 16 year-old daughter Rose (Camilla Belle). A dedicated environmentalist, Jack rages at real estate developers like Marty Rance (Beau Bridges). But when he asks his trashy girlfriend (Catherine Keener) and her two disparate sons (Ryan McDonald, Paul Dano) to move in, Rose feels deceived and betrayed. Rebecca Miller grew up in bucolic Roxbury, Connecticut, and remembers trees going down as chain saws and bulldozers turned dirt roads into paved highways. “I really had a sense of the landscape being violated,” she said. “A lot of my feelings about the land being alive and sacred came at that time. All of my films come out of a very personal place.” Like Miller’s “Personal Velocity” (2002), this narrative moves at a languid pace. Miller’s real-life husband, Daniel Day-Lewis, makes Jack eerily creepy with his barbaric tattoos and thick Scottish brogue. In fact, the entire acting ensemble trades on eccentric vulnerability, set against the inherent implausibility of the story. On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “The Ballad of Jack and Rose” is a somewhat self-conscious, sensitive 6. Think of it as an offbeat tone poem.
