A couple of years ago, moving back to my home town after a decade away in college and the Navy, I crested a hill which gave me my first look of the sprawling city below me and had to pull my car over, my mouth agape. Suburbia had swallowed everything. For what seemed like as far as I could see, treeless, cookie-cutter houses marched in perfect lines toward the horizon, exact copies of each other except for a window here, an awning there. I couldn’t – still can’t – imagine anyone who would want to invest their lives or their personalities in anything so utterly soulless. I may be prejudiced, but I adore my hundred-year-old Victorian—quirks and all.
If The Ballad of Jack and Rose had been out then, I know exactly the wearied diatribe that would have popped into my mind. As it is, soured radical Jack’s speech mirrors my own angst perfectly: “We’re all moving into these houses. The whole nation. A whole fucking world of plastic houses. It’s like a rash. In 30 years there won’t be anything left but suburbia. They all want to live in places with people exactly like themselves. That’s not a house. It’s a thing to keep the TV dry.”The Ballad of Jack and Rose opens among the detritus of a dilapidated commune on an unnamed island off the coast of an unnamed New England state, where a middle-aged hippie named Jack (Daniel Day-Lewis) and his 16-year-old daughter Rose (Camilla Belle) make their lives. What once served as a home and a great social experiment for many now serves only two. They might as well live in a biosphere. Jack has made a universe for Rose that is as impregnable from the outside world as possible. He allows very few visitors. Even fewer neighbors. Her world is his world and in it they have only each other.
Their lives are set to Dylan songs that only we can hear. Jack and Rose relax by lying on hillsides, embracing one another, and discerning shapes in the clouds. If we didn’t know any better, we’d think they were lovers. Perhaps we don’t know any better. It is not that there is anything incestuous between them. Not yet anyway. It’s just that Rose doesn’t really know anyone else but Jack. She is a nymph—guileless and innocent. She has been raised to believe she is exceptional. When she remarks of another character, “she’s so regular!” we realize her father has told her all her life that she is anything but. As hormones begin to course through her body, she has nowhere to direct them but toward her father. It’s as if she’s just realizing she is a woman and he is a man.
But their relationship, like their island, is being infected with outsiders. As it falls to the encroachment of outside forces, so their lives begin to fray and ultimately disintegrate. If Jack naively believed that he could keep Rose’s world one which encapsulated only themselves, he soon finds how mistaken he was. Ailing (Lewis, ever the superlative actor, has horrifically emaciated himself for the part) from a damaged heart which could succumb at any moment, Jack invites a girlfriend and her two sons—none of which Rose has ever met—to live with them and balance some of the work load.
Rose doesn’t react with jealousy or malice or spite. It is far more primal than that. She reacts instinctually – like an animal backed into a corner. Ultimately pulled between the two warring worlds within her, Rose finds her sexuality awakened by the boys and her protectiveness awakened by her father’s girlfriend, Kathleen (Catherine Keener). One she makes love to. The other she tries repeatedly to destroy.
“You’re not bad,” one of Kathleen’s sons says near the end of the film. “You’re innocent. Innocent people are just dangerous.”
This is a film as much about fiercely idealist choices as it is about erroneous and derailed ones. The sort that we never see coming even though they are screaming from the sidelines of our life for all the rest of the world to see. The sort that we try to repair in the middle of the meltdown and find it is too late to do anything except try to hold on and survive the ride.
The resulting collision of cultures and personalities leads to disaster. As long as Jack and Rose lived in seclusion, a certain stability and permanence could be maintained. But the introduction of others into their idyllic world, so aptly evoked in the film by a rattlesnake loose in the house—the serpent in paradise—results in a father’s downfall and perhaps a daughter’s liberation.
Written and directed by Daniel Day-Lewis’ wife, Rebecca Miller, the daughter of playwright Arthur Miller, The Ballad of Jack and Rose is an absorbing and evocative, if ultimately unbalanced experience. The film moves with a sort of kinetic, beautiful and haunting dynamic energy that can never quite decide if we are to love or loathe the naive and immature innocence of its characters. But it is so honestly written and vibrantly acted that it’s impossible not to be sucked in.
One of my favorite books is Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden” about the 19th century transcendentalist author’s attempt to live in nearly perfect isolation from the rest of the world in a tiny cabin in the woods of Massachusetts. Anyone familiar with the book knows that while he may have succeeded philosophically, he hardly succeeded literally. He simply could not do everything by himself. Nor did he really want to. His need to feel flesh and hear a voice other than his own unraveled his great experiment despite his best defenses. Perhaps, Jack should have paid closer attention to Thoreau. It might have spared he and Rose some needless pain. Still, it is a nice idea: the perfect community, bounded by love and a mutual ideal to live life simply, gracefully, selflessly. If only such experiments worked more often.
The Ballad of Jack and Rose, like the community it elucidates, is not perfect. Like the people who try so desperately to make the most of the world in which they live, it is full of flaws, inconsistencies, and shortcomings. As such, it is, perhaps, better left for true believers. The rest of us may just want to experience it with a guaranteed return policy.
© Copyright 2005 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.
