The Ballad of Jack and Rose Review

A dying idealist lives on an island off the East Coast with the daughter he raised inside the remains of his commune, and Rebecca Miller stages that premise as though the metaphor were already the story. Jack Slavin has a bad heart, a windmill and a hatred of the developer putting tract houses up across the water, and each of those is asked to stand for something larger than itself.

Ellen Kuras photographs the place with real feeling, gray light and sea grass and unfinished timber, and Camilla Belle is genuinely unsettling as Rose, a girl raised with nobody to measure herself against. Day-Lewis plays Jack's certainty as a symptom rather than a virtue, which is the right instinct. But the script reaches for shock where it needs consequence.

The snake in the bed, the abrupt marriage proposal, Rose's calculated approach to two teenage boys, Catherine Keener arriving with her sons only to be humiliated at dinner: these are staged for their charge and then abandoned. Keener is handed a thankless role and discarded. The incest undertone gets raised, hovered over and dropped, which is worse than committing to it or cutting it. By the time the house burns, the film is asking for elegy on behalf of a man nobody in it was allowed to answer back.