Word: balladeering
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Daniel Day-Lewis and Rebecca Miller’s first cinematic love-baby, The Ballad of Jack and Rose is far from smooth-skinned and gurgling—beneath the stunning surface is a disturbing whirl of chaos and sorrow...
...Ballad in fact echoes this family connection, though only in the sense of a girl meeting her possible “partner” in the house of her father. Unfortunately, the context and result of the situation is a bit less cheery than that of Day-Lewis and Miller. In the film, Jack’s (Day-Lewis) 16-year-old daughter Rose (Camille Belle, Jurassic Park), sees her world fall to pieces in a flash...
...Ballad is one of those films where you kick yourself for having paid for such a saddening experience, but soon the feeling fades, and all that you are left with is the memory of how visual the film was, forgetting the misery. It elicits not a bawling depression, but more of a building frustration, watching as petals of innocence are trampled by the stinking feet of the world...
...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...
...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