Misfits on a Sheltered Island

By RICHARD CORLISS

From the ruins of a Vietnam-era commune, Jack Slavin (Daniel Day-Lewis) has built a Hobbitish house for himself and his daughter Rose (Camilla Belle). The place is their bomb-shelter refuge from the modern world Jack fiercely resists. Now it is 1986, Jack is dying, and he decides that Rose, 16, needs a family to wean her from the isolation that has nurtured her. He invites his sometime lover Kathleen (Catherine Keener) and her two teenage sons to come live with them. The place was never quite Utopia, but it will soon become hell.

If The Ballad of Jack and Rose had shoulders, the viewer would be shaking them sternly. Of course it will all go wrong! Jack's social skills are so rusty they might give a visitor tetanus, and Rose couldn't have a ruder introduction to her own sexuality than from the complementarily weird sons. But getting scorpions to battle in a bottle is what drama does, and the movie carries an eerie fascination as it spins out the inevitable eruptions.

It's tempting to speculate, especially since writer-director Rebecca Miller is so quick to deflect the subject, that Jack could embody some aspect of her father Arthur. Tempting but fruitless, since the real kinship is with the work of another playwright, dead nearly 500 years. Jack is a blend of Prospero, lord of his fantasy island, and Lear, the mad king with a loving daughter. Rose is his Miranda, his Cordelia.

The film doesn't scale Shakespearean heights, but it does give its star a nicely gnarled ogre to play. Day-Lewis, who can make lunatic intensity seem a form of sainthood, finds in Jack a lion whose majesty is in the severe wounds he has inflicted and been afflicted by. The film is Jack's ballad, and Day-Lewis its roaring, charismatic bard. --By Richard Corliss