The Ballad of Jack and Rose

Rebecca Miller writes and directs a 111-minute drama about the last man standing in a commune and the daughter he has raised inside it. Jack Slavin (Daniel Day-Lewis) once believed that a few people on an island could live rightly, and the island now holds him, Rose (Camilla Belle), a wind turbine and a lot of weather. He is dying, and he knows that when he goes she will be alone with his ideas. The tagline on the poster reads “Selfhood begins with a walking away, and love is proved in the letting go”, which is the whole film in one line, and the trouble is that the film keeps saying it.

Day-Lewis is the reason to watch. He plays Jack as a man who has confused his principles with his acreage: courteous to his daughter, savage to anyone with a surveyor’s pole, and quietly aware that the two moods come from the same place. His rage at Marty Rance (Beau Bridges) and the half-built houses is funny and then frightening, because you can see he has nothing left to fight with but temper. Belle has the harder, stiller job and does it with her eyes. We were unsettled, properly, by how she looks at him; it is not quite a daughter’s look, the film knows it, and for a long stretch that knowledge gives the house a charge nothing else here has.

Catherine Keener gets the worst of the writing and does the most with it. Her Kathleen is a woman who has run out of better offers and knows how that sounds, and Keener plays the embarrassment rather than the hope. Paul Dano lounges through Thaddius with a grin that is already looking for the exit, and Ryan McDonald makes Rodney, the soft boy who wants to cut hair, the one person on the island you would trust with scissors. Jena Malone and Jason Lee arrive with parts that are more idea than person and leave the same way.

Ellen Kuras shoots the place in soft, damp light, the grass close enough to count and the farmhouse weathered to grey, and she keeps the camera on shoulders rather than tripods so the house feels lived in and slightly tilted. Mark Ricker has built the commune as a thing already half returned to the ground: the greenhouse, the turbine, the empty cabins of people who left years ago. Michael Rohatyn’s score is sparse and stays out of the quarrels. Sabine Hoffmann cuts the early scenes with patience, holding on faces after the lines are finished, which suits a film about people who do not say what they want.

Then Miller starts underlining. Every object in the second half stands for something, and the film makes sure we have noticed, in ways we will not detail here. Characters begin to speak their themes aloud, and Jack’s speeches about what the island meant turn from character into lecture. The melodrama arrives on schedule, and there is a closing passage that spells out in dialogue what the preceding hour had already shown. We found that passage embarrassing, and we say so as people who had been on the film’s side until then.

Miller’s previous film, Personal Velocity (2002), was three short stories about women, made cheaply and quickly, and it was good at leaving things alone. This one has a bigger star, a bigger house and less confidence that we will understand without help. She is married to Day-Lewis, which is a matter of record and not of much relevance, except that the film trusts him as it trusts no one else on screen, and that trust is well placed.

Most critics landed around the middle and so have we. If you want to watch Day-Lewis build a man out of a beard, an accent and a shotgun, there is enough here for an evening. If you want the film to let him be, you will spend the last half hour wishing it would.