REVIEWED - THE BALLAD OF JACK & ROSE: AFTER her enthralling 2002 triptych Personal Velocity, which acutely observed three women leaving the men in their lives for different reasons, writer-director Rebecca Miller has been drawn to the theme of fathers and daughters in her recent work.
AFTER her enthralling 2002 triptych Personal Velocity, which acutely observed three women leaving the men in their lives for different reasons, writer-director Rebecca Miller has been drawn to the theme of fathers and daughters in her recent work.
In Proof, for which Miller collaborated on the screenplay, a young woman has given up a promising career to care for her ailing father, and her sister, who moved away to build her own life, arrives to dispose of the family home after his death. Based on a stage play, Proof evoked a similar narrative in The Price, a play by Miller's father Arthur Miller, in which two sons are reunited to dispose of their parents' property.
The father and daughter of The Ballad of Jack & Rose, which Miller directed from her own original screenplay, share a close bond, living in isolation on an island off the east coast of the US. Their life is ostensibly idyllic in this Garden of Eden, which was a commune in the early 1970s. That was when Jack (Daniel Day-Lewis), a Scot with an inheritance, moved there and embraced all the ideals of the peace and love generation.
As the story begins, Jack is the last surviving relic of that group, but he remains stubbornly determined to defend and honour the values of the counter-culture. Rose (Camilla Belle), his 16-year-old daughter whom he raised alone after her mother died, is an equally independent spirit. Jack took Rose out of school when she was 11 - "I don't believe in factory farming," he explains - and educated her on the island.
Conscious of his own mortality, Jack is gaunt and ailing but persists in chain-smoking. With a view to arranging a surrogate parent for Rose, he persuades his mainland lover (Catherine Keener) to come and live on the island, along with her two teenaged sons by different fathers.
The legacy of the idealistic '60s generation is a theme rarely explored with any depth in movies, which is all the more surprising given that so many film-makers working today lived that era to the full. Miller, who was born in 1962, does not set out to deliver an elegy for those heady times, choosing instead to reflect on the utopian ambitions of the generation that preceded her, and on their various contradictions.
These are embodied in Jack as his past and present are drawn on a collision course that becomes inevitable in Miller's reflective and generally unpredictable scenario. In a telling sequence where Jack visits Rose in her tree house hideaway, his frame, though ominously bony, fills the space so awkwardly that it is clear he no longer can inhabit his daughter's world completely.
Strikingly photographed by Ellen Kuras, The Ballad of Jack & Rose is played with conviction and credibility by a small, well-chosen cast. Day-Lewis is riveting, once again subtly inhabiting a complex character in every detail and bringing him vividly to life.
