Chances are that Daniel Day-Lewis (The Unbearable Lightness of Being) was in for the third-degree if he turned down a part in The Ballad of Jack and Rose, written and directed by Rebecca Miller, his wife and the daughter of acclaimed playwright Arthur Miller. At least that’s the best possible explanation for his choice of roles. While he doesn’t sacrifice his genius and reputation to star in the film, delivering a typically incredible performance, his domestic obligations are clearly responsible for his participation in a film that in no way matches his talent.
The terminally-ill Jack (Day-Lewis) and his daughter Rose, played by Camilla Belle (Practical Magic), live on the remnants of an experimental commune that Jack began in the seventies with his ex-wife. The commune failed, and as a result suburban America begins to close in on Jack and the daughter that he desperately wants to protect from the outside world. Jack’s anti-capitalist, socialist vision informs a great deal of the movie, but seems a bit outdated. Idealistic hippies made these pleas three decades ago. Their cause shouldn’t go to naught, but this film brings nothing new to the age-old argument between the real estate developer and the old and dying land owner.
Jack’s illness consumes his daughter and somehow fuels her own self-destructive impulses. Catherine Keener (Lovely and Amazing) plays Kathleen, Jack’s lover, whom he convinces to stay on the commune so that Rose can have a female influence and a caregiver once he is dead. Rose is 16, an age at which every young girl needs a mother. Instead of confiding in Kathleen about sex and womanhood, however, Rose uses Kathleen’s teenaged son as her own personal sex toy, reacting to her father’s love affair with Kathleen in a show of jealousy. Her willing deflowering is a sign of her despair, and of the terrible outside world that Kathleen and her family have brought into their home.
The good news is that Urban Outfitters, Anthropologie and the various other women’s clothing franchises that depend on the recycled styles of past decades get great advertisement from the film. The house that Jack and his daughter Rose inhabit is covered with yellowing postcards and travel memorabilia, antique books, rustic but inviting kitchen ware and various blankets and bedspreads with a patchwork feel. Rose’s tree house is every young girl’s dream, stocked not with rusting nails and burrowing critters, but with blankets and pillows-more like a fashion photography set than an abandoned socialist commune.
Rose is clad throughout the film in long, springy white dresses over jeans, eclectic tie-dyed ponchos and cute flowery cardigans, whether planting flowers, running in the overgrown green grass or driving in her father’s painfully stereotypical woody wagon. The set and costumes, in their perfect imperfection, are a distraction from the minimalist, secluded life that Jack’s sacrifices have afforded them. The pretty colors in which Miller paints their lifestyle seem unrealistic.
A story of failed idealism, and human inability to act in the face of big business and development, this film is a let-down both to those it intends to glorify and to its audience. Rebecca Miller offers nothing new or revolutionary about the age-old fight against progress.
