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by Jordan Hiller

The Ballad of Jack and Rose (2005)

In the Beginning G-d created Rebecca Miller and it was good. A beautiful, sensitive writer/director/actress complete with the legacy of father Arthur (A’H) and the undying love of acting great Daniel Day Lewis.  Her Edenisitic ballad reveals the earthiness and purity of her essence and it is touching to see but alas there is a snake in the garden.

Much like M. Night Shyamalan’s latest masterwork The Village, Miller’s film is about a parent’s overzealous mission to shelter the children - keep them safe, and hidden, and guarded from the outside world. While Shyamalan played this theme to indulge in creepiness, Miller decides to expose it nakedly and attempts to convey the message with a certain gravity by stringing together a hodgepodge of awkward and disarming moments.

Day Lewis works admirably but not memorably as Jack, an ex-hippie still living on the commune island he and his buddies tried to get on the bus with in the late 60’s. Rose (Camille Belle) is his angelic cavewoman of a daughter devoted only to him and their way of life, but as we painfully learn , this is due to a stunted emotional development and a tainted psychological construction.

Miller chooses the moment of crisis to be the day a sick and dying Jack invites his inexplicably chosen ordinary but sweet girlfriend (Catherine Keener) along with her two sons – one rebel one cerebral – to live on the island as “an experiment”. Why someone as cautious and protective a parent as Jack would choose such a recipe for disaster is beyond reason and this lack of logic and truth in story-telling suffers the entire troubling dream of a movie.

With the exception of Keener, all the characters present are odd, unbalanced and discomforting. Not to say that we do not find this in the world, but simply put: the film leaves one queasy as opposed to settled, but for the wrong reasons. Jack is an awful parent though because he clearly loves his daughter some may interpret that as Miller’s way of portraying him as a well-intentioned teacher of agrarian beauty. Yet what he has done is stifled her, likely beyond repair. Because of her wavering approach to her characters (sometimes she likes and respects them, other times she fears and loathes them), it is impossible to get a handle on her vision. Many times Miler allows Bob Dylan, a guitar, and images of a wild ever-blooming landscape to do the talking. The idea at times appears to be that the world in its primitive untouched unaffected origin is splendid and progress is disastrous. This is a common theme of the movie, but at the very least, Miller argues both ways. Man and woman, she suggests at times, were thrown out of Paradise for a reason and a return is both physically and spiritually impossible, but even more so a delusional pursuit and morally wrong. As one of Keener’s sons quite poignantly reflects upon encountering Rose and her Tinkerbell-like mischievous reaction to the society affecting her like a virus, “innocent people are dangerous, not bad”. (For further pontificating on this topic see The Assassination of Richard Nixon review here).

Camille (Poison Ivy II)) Belle is the main attraction here and whether you like her or not and/or buy into her lost-girl characterization will determine your level of enjoyment. Her features are well chosen for this role as her face conveys little emotion beyond wonder and her version of love. She is not a great actress and in a role that merely requires her to be simple and infantile she manages to overplay it.

While I appreciate and respect Miller’s focus on nature and innocence, I couldn’t help but feel the film was puffed up and sustaining itself on esoteric nonsense. For a movie relying on some sort of ethereal charm to hypnotize its audience, I found little. Miller’s message movie about isolation on an island apart, for me, drifted too far from shore.