Family Follies
Day-Lewis' haunting turn can't quite rescuse unbelievable 'Jack & Rose'

An exceptional performamce by Daniel Day-Lewis highlights this eccentric drama of family relatons. It's not a showy, scenery-chomping, actorish turn like his Bill the Butcher in Gangs Of New York; this is Day-Lewis on a much more intimate scale, building character out of banked, conflicting passions corralled just below the surface, and moments of quicksilver nuance, captured in tight close-up by writer-director Rebecca Miller (Day-Lewis' real-life wife). We get so caught up in the dark complexities of the character, we don't realize until later what a hypnotic performance it is.

Too bad the rest of the film, as wryly acerbic and thoughtful as it often is, doesn't bear the same kind of scrutiny. Set in 1986, it's a father-daughter folie á deux in which Day-Lewis' Jack is the last surviving member of a '70s Utopian commune ("on an island of the East Coast of New York") left alone among the windmills and vegetable garden to raise his young teenage daugher Rose (Camilla Belle). Jack, an iconolastic Scot (he drives off the crew of a nearby housing development with a shotgun), and wild-child innocent Rose adore each other and prize their cranky solitude.

But Jack has a bad heart. And in a misguided attempt to provide for Rose's future stability, he impulsively invites his squeeze from town, Kathleen (Catherine Keener), to move in with her two teenage sons, frumpy Rodney (Ryan McDonald, who gets all the best one-liners) and surly Thaddius (Paul Dano.) Predictably, all hell breaks loose within the tightly woven fabric of Jack and Rose's idyllic relationship—complete with a snake of Knowledge on the loose and running amok in the house.

Moving in these virtual strangers is the first of many plot points that makes no sense, given what we know about Jack's passion for solitude and Rose's vulnerability. Miller is more interested in symbol and metaphor than real-life credibility as Rose loses her innocence and Jack copes with the failure of his ideals; oddly, Miller seems to understand Jack, but she never quite figures out Rose (whose cold-blooded pursuit of deflowering comes out of nowhere). Too many other details ring jarringly false as well (an uninhabited model home at a construction site, with electrical hookup and silverware in the drawers, is left unlocked; a bulldozer nearby is left ovrnight with keys in the ignition). There are too many hokey musical montages, and way too much gratuitous Bob Dylan. And the fact that Jack is apparently independently wealthy enough to indulge his eccentric whims removes the story further still from any recognizable reality. Only Day-Lewis' performance feels hauntingly true. (**1/2) (R) 111 minutes.

THE BALLAD OF JACK AND ROSE With Daniel Day-Lewis, Camilla Belle, and Catherine Keener. Written and directed by Rebecca Miller. An IFC release. Rated R. 111 minutes. (**1/2)
Review published in Good Times, May 5, 2005