The Ballad of Jack and Rose (2005, USA)

I came to this movie with a very specific perspective – this might be an overshare, but I was raised by (somewhat) reformed hippies, and my father in particular had difficulty reconciling his idealistic and self-interested past with the duties of being a parent. I grew up in a house not entirely unlike Jack & Rose’s until I was nearly her age, and the degree of isolation that Rose deals with in Ballad reminds me of my own early adolescence, which has been both a blessing and a difficulty to me. In any case, between both my own family and those similar to us in the town where I grew up, I learned a lot at an early age about the vanity, selfishness, and gross snobbery that went hand-in-hand with certain aspects of hippie idealism.

While the subject matter of Ballad was familiar to me, I found the execution heavy-handed – writer/director Rebecca Miller has difficulty reining herself in, and some of her metaphors, use of period music, and dialog are pretty over-the-top. But it’s always worthwhile to see Daniel Day-Lewis do his thing, and I’m sure working with Miller, his wife, was an interesting experiment for both of them – I can’t remember seeing him quite this emotionally entrenched in a character before, and he does a wonderful job playing a very difficult and often hard-to-like man. Camilla Belle, as Rose, is also very good – as is the rest of the cast, though I think that Catherine Keener doesn't get the opportunity to expand upon her character as she might have.

In the end, I’m not entirely sure what I was supposed to take from The Ballad of Jack and Rose. It’s such a specific story, and the narrow focus makes it difficult for some of the larger themes to translate. For example, the rebellion of adolescence is a pretty universal concept, but as it develops within Rose’s insular world, her form of rebellion can be hard to relate to, even for someone who knows some of where she’s coming from.