Ballad

Ballad

“Jack and Rose” is the final melancholy ballad of flower power in the 1960s. A middle-aged hippie and his teenage daughter live alone on an island off the East Coast in what was once a commune. Wind powers a generator. There is no TV. The garden is fertilized with seaweed. They read together.

He teaches her at home. They share chores between them. When Jack looks at Rose, she gazes back at him with worshipful eyes and that’s not right. Lying side by side on the sod roof of their cottage, they look up at the sky to find shapes in the clouds like lovers would do. She is old enough for her hormones to vibrate around men, and there’s only one in her life.

Rebecca Miller’s film isn’t about incest; it’s about incestuous feelings and the father’s efforts, almost too late, to avoid it the danger of which he feels creeping closer for some time now. Jack (Daniel Day- Lewis) is a passionate idealist who occasionally visits the other side of the island where he fires shotgun blasts over construction workers’ heads as part of a housing development built by “the developer.” Rose (Camilla Belle) reveres him as her superhero: “If you die then I’m gonna die,” she says; “if you die,” he replies, “there will’ve been no point to my living.”

This isn’t academic talk, since he has had a heart attack and may die soon afterward anyway although she regularly takes away his home-rolled cigarettes when it is visible but out of sight he chain smokes heavily enough to be skin and bones thin with an idealistically serene outer layer that sometimes reveals fierce anger just below its surface more than once while Kathleen Keener barely raises an eyebrow at all this but how much does she know about him?

She has never been out here before Beau Bridges plays Jack’s nemesis who is building new homes on wetlands where “that’s not even a house!” It’s just something to keep TVs dry!

The film’s best scenes involve the introduction of these three outsiders into the solitude of Jack and Rose. The sons, by different fathers, are different creatures. Rodney (Ryan McDonald) is an exomorphic sweetheart; Thaddius (Paul Dano) is a skinny pothead. “I’m studying to be a women’s hairdresser,” Rodney tells Rose. “I wanted to be a barber, but men don’t get enough pleasure out of their hair.”

Having possibly fantasized herself as her father’s lover, Rose reacts with anger to the newcomers and determines in revenge to lose her virginity as soon as possible. She asks Rodney to sleep with her, but he demurs (“I am sure my brother will be happy to oblige”) and suggests a haircut instead. The short-haired Rose seems to have grown up overnight, and in reaction to her father’s “experiment” offers him evidence of an experiment of her own.

The fundamental flaws in their idyllic island hideaway become obvious. As long as Jack and Rose lived in isolation, a certain continuity could be maintained. But the introduction of Kathleen as her father’s lover, and the news that she is to start attending a school in town, cause Rose to rage against the loss of what? Her innocence, or her ideas about her father’s innocence?

Rebecca Miller, the writer and director, had a strong father of her own, the playwright Arthur Miller. She had a strong mother, too; the photographer Inge Morath. That she is now essentially the photographer (although the cinematography is by the visual poet Ellen Kuras) and her subject is a father and daughter may show her not acting out her own childhood, as some writers have suggested, but identifying with her mother.

It would be reckless and probably wrong to find literal parallels between Rebecca and Rose, but perhaps the film’s emotional conflicts have an autobiographical engine.

Toward the end of the film events pile up too quickly; there are poisonous snakes and sudden injuries confrontations with builder medical concerns Jack resembles dying characters in movies: His health closely mirrors requirements story By I had too much sense strands that strayed far neatly concluded there was epilogue could done without.

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