The Ballad of Jack and Rose

Stop all the clocks: Daniel Day-Lewis has made a movie. It’s a family affair, too, as the lyrical ‘The Ballad of Jack & Rose’ is written and directed by Day-Lewis’s wife, Rebecca Miller, who takes us to a fading hippy commune in the mid-1980s to examine the dying idealism of the 1960s and its effect on two people, the titular father and daughter (Day-Lewis and Camilla Belle). Jack and Rose are the only two inhabitants left on a communal plot of land on an island somewhere off the east coast of America. But the status quo is soon to be shaken: Jack is dying, so he asks his more worldly lover Kathleen (Catherine Keener) and her two teenage sons to come and live with them. This jolt to their sheltered existence shocks both him and Rose into accepting long-suppressed or undiscovered issues relating to their identity, sexuality and futures. The performances by both Day-Lewis and Belle, whose characters share an intense, near-incestuous relationship, are a joy to watch and most of Miller’s explorative script is fascinating too, if somewhat melodramatic towards its oddly unmoving climax. Fascinating but a little uneven.