USA, 2005. Rated R. 111 minutes.
Cast: Daniel Day-Lewis, Camilla Belle, Catherine Keener, Paul Dano, Ryan McDonald, Jena Malone, Beau Bridges, Jason Lee
Writer: Rebecca Miller
Music: Michael Rohatyn
Cinematography: Ellen Kuras
Producer: Lemore Syvan
Director: Rebecca Miller
Rose and the Snake, the working title of the new film from writer/director Rebecca Miller (Personal Velocity) is so much more intriguingly appropriate than its actual title. The Ballad of Jack and Rose calls to mind an effete guy in purple tights with a lute, or maybe a Bob Dylan number. Rose and the Snake evokes so much more—a Garden of Eden, an innocent girl introduced to forbidden knowledge and/or carnal desires, and of course, actual serpents. The Ballad of Jack and Rose has all those things.
Meet 16-year-old sugar magnolia Rose (Camille Belle) and her skeletal father Jack (Daniel Day-Lewis). The year is 1986, and the two occupy the ramshackle remnants of a Sixties commune on an island somewhere off the East Coast of the United States. Jack and Rose, whom Jack has home schooled since the age of eleven, have little contact with the outside world. Seeming more like husband and wife than father and daughter, the two share a complicated, intimate routine. All is not peace, love, and understanding, however. When a truck arrives at a construction site that Jack believes encroaches on protected wetlands, Rose knows the drill. She wordlessly fetches Jack his prehistoric rifle, so he can chase off the workers and rant, “This is not a house! It’s a thing to keep the TV dry!†Jack likes to go around telling people (well, Jason Lee anyway) that they’re being exploited, and offering them loans so they can set up a business of their own. Jack is loaded, you see, which does tend to take some stress out of running a self-sufficient commune. Anyway, Jack’s feud with Marty the developer (Beau Bridges) proves to be an ongoing subplot. (Tangential question: why would anyone leave bulldozers unattended on a construction site when there’s a vandal on the loose?)
This film isn’t about Jack’s political beliefs or his money, though. It’s about Rose needing to separate from Jack. Despite being practically a woman grown, when it comes to social and romantic interactions Rose may as well be Lennie from Of Mice and Men. With no other man upon whom to direct her attentions, Rose has developed an uncomfortably intimate attachment to her father. She decides that if Jack dies, she will die, too. “If you die, there will have been no point to my life,†Jack admonishes her. Not a purely theoretical scenario, by the way. Jack is not at all well.
Jack’s realizations, particularly vis-à -vis his daughter, offer rich dramatic possibilities. Nonetheless, the shift is a bit awkward in that it crowds out Rose’s development, which not only had been the story’s original focus, but also becomes more inscrutable as it grows more bizarre. Day-Lewis sometimes is too brilliant an actor for his own good. There is a natural tendency for filmmakers to want to make him the center of attention—particularly (one would think) if they’re married to him, as Rebecca Miller is—even when it may not be appropriate. This was the case in Gangs of New York, wherein the more Day-Lewis chewed up scenery, the less the story served anyone else. In The Ballad of Jack and Rose, the resolution of Rose’s story remains a cipher, and the irrelevant epilogue offers no help in decoding it.