Rebecca Miller writes her own films, mostly about women at a turning point, and she trusts her actors. She trusts her audience less: she has a habit of telling us what the picture means, and her films are better when she leaves things alone.
Fi1m perspective
Near the end of The Ballad of Jack and Rose (2005) somebody says aloud, in plain dialogue, what the previous hour had already shown. The poster had done the same, with a tagline about selfhood and letting go that is the whole film in one sentence. This is Rebecca Miller's habit. She has a subject worth having, a father whose principles have become his property, and the right actor in Daniel Day-Lewis to play him, and she does not quite believe we will understand without help. We had been on the film's side until that closing passage, and then we were embarrassed for it, which is a worse feeling than being bored.
She came to film from painting and sculpture, by way of acting, and every feature has been her own script: Angela (1995), Personal Velocity: Three Portraits (2002), The Ballad of Jack and Rose, The Private Lives of Pippa Lee (2009), Maggie's Plan (2015) and She Came to Me (2023). The subject is nearly always a woman at a turning point, and twice the material came from her own prose, since Personal Velocity and Pippa Lee were adapted from her books. She has said she makes her films in twos, and the list does fall into pairs: two wistful dramas, two films that move in and out of the past with voiceover, two attempts at romantic comedy. Between them she wrote Proof (2005) for John Madden, and lately she has turned to documentary with Arthur Miller: Writer (2017) and the five-part Mr. Scorsese (2025).
What works is the faith she puts in actors and the willingness to try a new shape each time: three short stories made cheaply and quickly in Personal Velocity, which was good at leaving things alone; a large ensemble and a broken timeline in Pippa Lee. She has kept the same cinematographer, Ellen Kuras, for three films and the same editor, Sabine Hoffman, for three, which suggests someone who knows what she wants and holds on to the people who give it to her. What does not work is the underlining. On the island, every object in the second half comes to stand for something and the film makes sure we have noticed, and Jack's speeches turn from character into lecture. The comedies have been found slight by the reviews so far, and the last of them was accused of not being funny, which for a romantic comedy is the one charge that counts.
If you are new to her, start with Personal Velocity, and give The Ballad of Jack and Rose an evening for Day-Lewis and for its first hour, with patience for what follows. If she really does work in twos, the Scorsese series closes a pair and the next fiction film opens one. We would like it to be the kind that stops talking before the audience has to.
Biography
Rebecca Miller is an American filmmaker, screenwriter and novelist. Born on 15 September 1962 in Roxbury, Connecticut, she is the daughter of playwright Arthur Miller and photographer Inge Morath. She studied at Yale University.
Miller wrote and directed the films Angela (1995), Personal Velocity: Three Portraits (2002), The Ballad of Jack and Rose (2005), The Private Lives of Pippa Lee (2009), Maggie's Plan (2015) and She Came to Me (2023). She has also written the novels The Private Lives of Pippa Lee and Jacob's Folly. She received the Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize for Personal Velocity and the Gotham Independent Film Award for Breakthrough Director for Angela. She has been married to actor Daniel Day-Lewis since 1996.
