Sky K Studios Movie Blog

The Ballad of Jack and Rose

The Ballad of Jack and Rose tells the story of a dying man and his daughter. They live on an island, among the ruins of an intentional community that has faded away since its height in the sixties. The island and the title characters bring to mind Dr. Rappaccini and Beatrice of Hawthorne's short story Rappaccini's Daughter. In that story, a scientist raises his daughter amid poisonous plants as an experiment to make her immune to the worst of the world; Jack has kept Rose out of school since she was eleven, preserving in her the last vestige of the commune's dream of a better world.

The intensity of their relationship drives the movie but also strains belief, and the movie comes off as something of a frostbite victim, pulling warmth away from the extremities and into the core. Jack and Rose on their own are pitiable curiosities, and the time the movie spends with just the two of them is suffocating. But the scenes where Jack and Rose have to live among people crackle unpredictably.

The movie's great accomplishment is that as much as Jack (Daniel Day-Lewis) would like to suck all the oxygen from the room, he can't: the other actors are too damn good. Catherine Keener plays a co-dependent, blue-collar single mom who with moves out to the island to take care of Jack in his decline. She comes with too little preparation and two sons, each the fruit of a different (but equally ill-advised) affair. In stark contrast to Jack and Rose's willed fantasy of separation, every move she makes is desperately social. She needs people, and she knows they won't stay around her without a lot of deliberate, planned labor. By themselves, Jack and Rose are just about too far gone, veering towards incest and airlessness; the movie is at its best when Keener's human character has to adapt to their funhouse commune. Keener's two sons, a proto-sexy acne-touched burnout and a schlubby gay hairdresser, neither played by a recognized actor, each hold their own and more. Even the "evil developer" whose encroachments threaten all that is good is written and played humanely; it helps that he's Beau Bridges, who can play this part as a stolid citizen who likes building places for people to live (albeit over wetlands), not as a villain who cackles and counts his gold bags.

The sympathetic portrayal of the developer is to Jack and Rose's political credit; but its portrayal of the sixties is even more politically complicated. My first though was that it was outright reactionary. Jack's communal vision could only be underwritten by his personal fortune; the only end to that vision is in a hospice cloister, with incest and poisonous serpents looming. (Rappaccini's Garden was an inversion of Eden, and it's just as likely that Miller was playing with that myth and ending up in the same place as it was that she cribbed from Hawthorne.) But, of course, it's not the only end; daughter Rose escapes the island, and you could argue that in her quasi-communal, agrarian life After The Fall, the vision of the sixties continues to play out. But though life she builds is generous and organic, it is not political.

For politics, it seems, are too toxic. At the end of Rappaccini's Daughter, the dying title character Beatrice asks her father, who has made her immune to poison but fatally susceptible to its antidote, "Oh, was there not, from the first, more poison in thy nature than in mine?" Rose can purge the poison from her system. But it is quite clearly poison.

posted by Josh K-sky at 5:18 PM