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Directed by the daughter of playwright Arthur Miller (as well as being the wife of male lead Daniel Day Lewis), The Ballad of Jack & Rose plays out as two disperate films rolled into one uneven package. On the one hand, it is a film about a father and daughter and their trepidatious relationship. On the other hand it is a film about old versus new. A communistic mentality of sharing and comforting against a mentality of greed and corporate/suburban intrusion. The film only works on the former level and only manages to feel like a cliche in the latter.
Daniel Day-Lewis is (as always) brilliantly aloof as the father of a teenage daughter who wants to raise her in his own traditional down-to-Earth hippy kind of way. Unfortunately he is quickly dying and doesn't want his Rose to be left alone in a world she has no clue of understanding. Raised inside a seeming vacuum, with no knowledge of the world of T.V or movies or the modern pop cultured world, Rose - played with a quiet ferocity by Camilla Belle - is a time-bomb of sexual curiosity, just pining away for her father's eternal love and the more physical love of a man. Sometimes, in young Rose's mind, these two kinds of love are forever intertwined in a dark mass confusion. Thrown into the middle of this steaming pot is Kathleen - portrayed by the tough beauty and oft-overlooked Catherine Keener - Jack's secret girlfriend and a frazzled, bumfuzzled mother of two teenaged boys.
A biting and ultimately fatal story given the weight of truth by these three great actors, is only pulled asunder when tossed into the "other" subplot of suburban sprawl and Jack's futile fight against the coming of a housing developemnt upon his once peaceful communal island. Full of cliches and lost metaphors, this half of the film (actually only about a fourth of it), may be the thing keeping this well-made film from becoming the potentially great work it could be. [04/24/05]
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