MOVIE REVIEW Rambling 'Rose' loses way

The movie begins with intrigue, but it develops into silliness.
By DESSON THOMSON
WASHINGTON POST
"The Ballad of Jack and Rose" is an engaging battle between terrific acting and a flawed script. Unfortunately, the actors -- including Daniel Day-Lewis, Catherine Keener and extraordinary newcomer Camilla Belle -- lose. Writer-director Rebecca Miller's screenplay is provocative and original enough to hold its ground for a long time. But when the big picture becomes clear, our belief and trust ebb away.
Jack (Day-Lewis) and his 16-year-old daughter, Rose (Belle), live together in a self-built house on an island somewhere off the East Coast. The year is 1986. Their home is the last holdout of a hippie commune founded some 20 years earlier. They live off the land in what seems to be an idyllic existence. But there is trouble without and within. Their privacy is threatened by Marty Rance (Beau Bridges), a developer who is erecting ugly prefab homes everywhere. Jack's response is to load his shotgun and scare off the workmen.
Jack is also ailing with something, for which he needs pills. The sickness is serious enough, it seems, for him to seek parental help. He asks his girlfriend, Kathleen (Keener), and her two teen-age sons, Rodney (Ryan McDonald) and Thaddius (Paul Dano), to move in with him. But Rose, who has never met Kathleen, is openly hostile to the new arrangement. And when she doesn't like something, she does dramatic things. Jack realizes that, as long as he has lived with Rose, he knows almost nothing about her.
Characters
The surprises of this movie are in the revelations about the characters. Everyone is deeply intriguing, including Rodney, a surly kid who once made pocket money trapping snakes for an evangelist, and Thaddius, a social wallflower with a sensitive appreciation for Rose's vulnerability. The in-house war is the best part of the movie, as Jack and Rose (the established order) take on Kathleen and her male invaders. But it also marks the beginning of the film's premature demise.
Miller, who is married to Day-Lewis and is the daughter of playwright Arthur Miller, has a signature style that is refreshingly heedless to the boring laws of narrative and visual continuity.
"Jack and Rose" seems to wander wherever it likes, always looking for amusing or provocative character behavior. But that looseness also proves Miller's undoing. The serendipity becomes tedious and random, and the themes (the tyranny of idealism vs. the tyranny of civilization, for instance) are so fraught with forced profundity, they become laughably schematic. Jack and Rose are supposed to be facing some of the most torturous questions in their lives, but they end up looking increasingly silly. We start off quite fascinated with them. We end up just hoping they'll find a graceful exit.