Gray: I wouldn't be able to do that.
Jack Slavin: If you don't like your situation, then change it. If you can't change it, then leave it. It's your fucking life, man.
Gray: I appreciate it.
Remember the story of the Japanese soldier who did not realize World War 2 was over until 1972? In 1944, Lt. Hiroo Onoda was sent by the Japanese army to the remote Philippine island of Lubang. His mission was to conduct guerrilla warfare during World War II. Unfortunately, he was never officially told the war had ended; so for 29 years, Onoda continued to live in the jungle, ready for when his country would again need his services and information. Eating coconuts and bananas and deftly evading searching parties he believed were enemy scouts, Onoda hid in the jungle until he finally emerged from the dark recesses of the island on March 19, 1972.
The titled Jack of Rebecca Miller's "The Ballad of Jack and Rose," is American, not Japanese, and though he did not hole up in a jungle, he did hide from civilization. Like his Japanese counterpart, he could not reconcile himself to the fact that his mission was long over. "Ballad," which exhibits the results of its principal character's mission, is Rebecca Miller's third film. The daughter of playwright Arthur Miller and wife of Daniel Day-Lewis is best known for her "Personal Velocity," personal vignettes of three women, and though the principal character this time around is a man, a feminine point of view is apparent in the story.
The story centers on an unusual relationship between Jack Slavin (Daniel Day-Lewis) and his sixteen-year-old daughter Rose (Camilla Belle). Jack, who lives on an inheritance from his father, had bought some land on an island off the East Coast of the U.S. (actually filmed by Ellen Kuras in three villages of Canada's Prince Edward Island). The land, as we learn through Miller's insightful dialogue, was bought by Jack in ‘67 where it was used for a commune, but Jack and his daughter are the only ones remaining on this isolated plot. The home-schooled Rose is as sheltered as you can get, a young woman that could have come from Night Shyamalan's "The Village." Her love for her father, who is dying from a heart disease, is so exclusive that she will tolerate no outsiders in the cabin. When Jack–as an experiment–invites his lover Kathleen (Catherine Keener) and her two sons Thaddius (Paul Dano) and Rodney (Ryan McDonald) to live with him in the cabin, Rose's life is thrown into turmoil.
Side roles are well cast. Beau Bridges takes on the role of a builder, Marty Rance, who aims to develop housing in the land adjacent to Jack's–which motivates Jack's destructive retaliation against this whiff of modernity. Paul Dano is Kathleen's son Thaddius, a sex machine whose exerts his charms on a willing Rose. Ryan McDonald as Thaddius's half-brother Rodney, not only looks like a young Jack Black but provides much of the film's wit by talking like Mr. Black as well.
The unhealthy relationship between Jack and his too-loving daughter rivets the attention and exposes the depth of Jack's character. He's a control freak who had pulled the girl from school when she was eleven, a guy whose demanding character may well have been responsible for the desertion of the entire commune. He is an unreconstructed hippie whose ideals are so over-the-top that they prove to be dangerous to those around him, and in fact the film, appropriately labeled a "ballad," plays like a fable. Jack's role as a fellow who is too extreme for the likes of the Sierra Club, has both destructive and amusing contacts with the developer, a friendly George W.
Bush type, adding to the film's humor while nicely providing more insight into Jack's extreme environmentalism.
By : Harvey S. Karten
Source: rec.art.movies.reviews newsgroup
Rating: 3
THE BALLAD OF JACK AND ROSE, an art house pretender, is nothing more than another film on the level of a TV disease movie of the week. Daniel Day-Lewis stars as Jack, a dying member of an almost dead commune he helped found back in 1967. Jack, sometimes aided by his teenage daughter Rose (Camilla Belle), is an ecoterrorist with good intentions. An outstanding steward of the environment -- we know this because he recycles and has a rotary phone -- Jack wants to stop progress, in the form of new housing, from coming to the island on which he lives.
Beau Bridges plays Marty Rance, the island's new developer, who isn't even angry when Jack destroys one of his houses. Marty can always rebuild it, which he explains calmly and kindly to Jack. The script manages to make this developer, with his ridiculously altruistic heart, be ipso facto evil because he represents suburban sprawl.
THE BALLAD OF JACK AND ROSE's writer and director, Rebecca Miller, who did such a fine job in PERSONAL VELOCITY: THREE PORTRAITS, isn't able to develop any convincing or compelling characters in this quirky drama. From the beginning, it's clear that the movie will be one long march to death, so why does Miller have to take so long before she finally puts Jack and us out of our collective misery?
THE BALLAD OF JACK AND ROSE runs 1:51. It is rated R for "language, sexual content and some drug material" and would be acceptable for teenagers.
By : Steve Rhodes (http://www.internetreviews.com/)
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