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The Ballad of Jack and Rose (2005)

The Ballad of Jack and Rose
Hoosier Daddy

Starring:

Daniel Day Lewis
Camilla Belle
Catherine Keener
Jena Malone
Beau Bridges

Released By:

IFC Films

Released In:

2005

Rated:

R

Reviewed By:

The Boneman

Grade:

C+


The Ballad of Jack and Rose starts off as Jack (Daniel Day Lewis) and Rose (Camilla Belle) are laying together on the long grass looking up at the sky trying to make shapes out of the clouds. They live in cool looking, wood-inlay bunker of sorts halfway built into the ground with the front exposed. They have no television and at first their conversation does nothing to enlighten us as to the nature of their relationship. They seem intimate, but the vast difference in their ages gives pause. A back hoe drives by in the distance and as one they snap into action, grabbing a shotgun and hopping into a truck and pealing out.

They head toward what looks like town, some sort of civilization, with a lot of unattractive tract homes being built. One in particular is just studs and a skeletal roof with a dozen workers busily engaged in their various trades. Jack and Rose sneak up on the men and Jack fires a shot or two over their heads sending them scrambling for their trucks. On the way home Jack and Rose share a laugh, but there is a faraway look of concern in Jack's eyes. Before long we learn that they are father and daughter and they are the last living remnants of a commune that thrived in the early seventies. Your basic grow your own, farmers and vegetarians - societal and drug experimenters, who have all lost interest and gone off to seek normal lives - including Rose's mother.

It is 1992 and Jack is content with the simple life off the power-grid and remains a thorn in the side of the local real estate developer played by Beau Bridges. But their life of blissful isolation from the rest of the vulgarities of the world cannot go on much longer due to a heart condition that has numbered Jack's days and is forcing his hand as to finding a suitable way to provide for Rose when his time comes. Just about all of his hopes are pinned to a woman in town whom he's carried out a secretive affair with for some time Catherine Keener, who lives with her aunt along with her two teenage sons Thaddeus (Paul Dano - a thuggish womanizer in training) and Rodney (a sensitive, likable, heavy-set, older teen played by Ryan McDonald) Keener vigilantly hawks Rodney's eating habits, trying in that mixture of overbearing parental concern to see his encouraging weight-loss pattern continue (16 pounds and counting she announces). For his part Rodney is embarrassed and secretly rebellious - a fact that manifests itself when his good friend Red Berry (an eccentric Jena Malone) shows up with a fake pregnant belly full of candy bars.

Hoping against all hope for a solution to his "Rose problem" Jack invites Kathleen and her boys to come and live with him and Rose. Jack sweetens the deal with a check to help with moving expenses (he is wealthy due to selling his father's business years ago). And so the great social experiment is under way. Soon the humble little abode is crowded with conflicting personalities and alas the plot has thickened. In fact it becomes so thick that it practically congeals around them. Which turns the gifted writer/director Rebecca Miller's simple tale into something of an unmanageable mess. Miller has dazzled with her indie debut Personal Velocity and also co-wrote the screenplay for Proof. But the Ballad of Jack and Rose is ample proof that the gifted Miller is far from infallible

As for The Ballad of Jack and Rose, the second she changes it from being a two character study into this close quarters Yours, Mine and Ours - it really loses it's potential. Daniel Day Lewis proves for the umpteenth time that he is as compelling an actor as we have, and the always sturdy Keener does her best, but ultimately it becomes a battle between good acting and a flawed script that comes out in favor of the acting thanks to newcomer Camilla Belle, who really holds her own against these heavyweights, the story is really about her and her skewed coming of age as a result of her father's second attempt at communal living and her innocent/malicious way of acting out under the circumstances gives the film it's conflict kick, which some will buy into and others will consider a bit of a reach.

The character of Jack could certainly be viewed as a romantic contrivance - this misunderstood, last of a dying breed of roguish men of principle. In any other hands, Miller's Jack wouldn't have borne up under the weight of such an obvious portrait, but again Lewis was born to do the impossible. Because of his desperate need for this to work, Jack must put up with a lot of things going on under his roof, that fly in the face of his beliefs. When Rose is consentually deflowered under Thaddeus' cheap ministrations Jack's cannot help his hypocrisy. Ironically Rose had initially offered her virginity to Rodney, whose discomfiture at the notion belies his homosexuality. Instead of claiming her virtue he cuts 15 inches off her hair, leaving her with a boyish Mia Farrow cut - his dream is to become a hair stylist.

Rose was raised in this paradigm of free love and wished to mimic her mother and father with her budding sexuality. Miller weaves subtextual undertones of incest, as Rose considers this invasion of she and her father's private world as a most painful betrayal. To further rub salt into her father's growing wound, Rose gathers the whole gang into what she calls the Acid Room (Jack refers to it now as the conference room) where she plays a home movie of the commune at it's most decadent height - naked women dancing freely inspired by whatever hallucinogen, children naked and clearly ill-looked-after, sex and even snippets of homosexual acts.

The effect is of course to force Jack to confront his own hypocrisy, to examine the possibility the he hasn't escaped the hang-ups of the world he went to such great lengths to disavow, but has reverted to the very type of person he once so vehemently rebelled against. All very hard on his ticker. When a scuffle results in Thaddeus' fall from the acid house' window, which puts him in the hospital the honeymoon is over and in a tough scene we see Jack and Kathleen barter the amount of money requisite to buy back his and Rose's old way of life. With a check for $20,000 in her hand Kathleen weeps, but then wipes it away and gets down to the business of caring for her boys.

Miller's game, but somewhat flawed attempt to exhume the corpse of this part of our nation's history certainly has it's moments, but for a film maker known more for her incisive ability to dissect the American dream through her writing, it is all the more disappointing. There is a certain poetry to the way she wraps up the Ballad of Jack and Rose, but it's more of a limerick whose last stanza is nothing if not predictable.

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