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Ballad's island girl Belle.
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The Ballad of Jack and Rose
Opens Fri., April 1, at Metro and Uptown
In college, a talented prelaw classmate of mine once said he felt overshadowed because his parents were celebrated legal scholars: "You know what Newton said about how we stand on the shoulders of giants? Well, giants have stood on my shoulders!" Still bigger giants stood on the shoulders of Rebecca Miller and Daniel Day-Lewis, the writer-director and star of Ballad. Their dads were rich and famous leftist intellectuals: Arthur Miller, the American Aeschylus, and C. Day, the British poet laureate.
Like Arthur Miller, the film's hero, Jack (Day-Lewis), has an only daughter, Rose (Camilla Belle). They're the last occupants of the Luddite island commune Jack founded and funded in hippie days. He homeschools Rose in engineering and separatist environmentalist politics; aside from that, she's a Hawthornesque wild child, with a lovely face like a blank slate. She's 16 and never been kissed, except, unsettlingly and ambiguously, by him.
Jack's got a bum ticker, so he rather coldly writes a fat check to hire his occasional mistress (Catherine Keener in a role startlingly more vulnerable than her usual urban hard-chick shtick) to help raise Rose. Kathleen brings along her more conventionally screwed-up kids: savage, horny stoner teen Thadius (Paul Dano) and his kindly, asexual butterball half-brother, Rodney (Ryan McDonald, an actor to watch). There's just a hint of Arthur Miller in the family feud that results, especially in the brothers' strife. But mostly it's like a reality show about ill-suited roommates in an ascetic hobbit's hole.
The acting is top-notch, and lots of the scenes pack comic punch or mythic power. Rose is furious that Jack let outsiders invade their hilltop Eden, and the sight of Kathleen in Jack's bed makes her reach for the shotgun and uncage the snake. She's the most original sexual siren now on screen: She twinkles her peepers and dangles her virginal baubles before the boys, but has no actual interest in sex—she just wants to fuck with her father's control-freak head. Her motives are interestingly amoral and ambiguous, like a cyclone.
Alas, great scenes do not a movie make. Father's and daughter's motives are too opaque to flesh out any sense of character. The scenes add up to no intelligible plot. Major characters randomly wander in and out of what ought to be the story. Minor characters—a drifter chick, a sensitive gardener—pop up with winning vividness but to no apparent narrative purpose. Symbols (a snake, a dreamlike ox) darkly signify without actually spelling out anything significant. Wonderfully promising character clashes peter out. Even the most obvious and central combat, between Jack and the developer (Beau Bridges) who's bulldozing Jack's ecotopia into plastic suburbia, concludes inconclusively.
Rebecca Miller is no tragedian like her dad. She's a lyrical poet with an elliptical turn of mind. She submitted the Ballad script to Day-Lewis years before she knew him. He only agreed to star in it after they'd married and had children. It does have moments of beauty and mystery, but ultimately it's a muddle. He was right to turn it down the first time. (R) TIM APPELO
Beauty Shop
Opens Wed., March 30, at Pacific Place and others
Just when you're positive that you've seen everything, along comes a movie like Beauty Shop to show new ways of throwing away talent. After earning an Oscar nomination for Chicago, then supporting Ice Cube in Barbershop 2, Queen Latifah reprises the latter movie's character of Gina, a talented hair stylist who decides to open her own Atlanta salon after yet another run-in with her evil and controlling boss, Jorge (Kevin Bacon, sporting stringy bleached hair, orangish skin, and a hideous accent). She takes with her shampoo girl Lynn (sickly sweet Alicia Silverstone, with an even more revolting accent) and pieces together a successful and lively beauty shop. (She also inherits a gaggle of sassy stylists from the previous tenant and benefits from the help of her devoted but eccentric friends and family—ain't capitalism grand?)
Meanwhile, struggling to keep her daughter, Vanessa (Paige Hurd), in a prestigious music school, Gina also has to cope with Jorge's constant sabotage efforts and distractions like sexy electrician Joe (Djimon Hounsou). There are a few entertaining moments to Beauty Shop, like Gina trying to make her ass look bigger, and Miss Josephine (Alfre Woodard) breaking into Maya Angelou poems every 10 seconds. No doubt, Latifah is a talented actress and an enjoyable presence on screen, but she can't fix the fact that she has zero chemistry with Hounsou. Silverstone simply scares the audience with her bad Southern drawl and twitching lip. This Shop will receive few repeat customers. (PG-13) HEATHER LOGUE
Los Angeles Plays Itself
Runs Fri., April 1–Thurs., April 7, at Northwest Film Forum
Not many of us remember the 1996 Steven Seagal cop flick The Glimmer Man. Why is it worth including in this absorbing, high-minded, nearly three-hour-long documentary? Because the movie, like almost 200 others excerpted here, was shot in Los Angeles. It's set there, too, unlike most of the clips collected by film scholar Thom Anderson. As he explains in a voice-over that's really a lecture (and actually read by someone else), the hometown of the entertainment industry is usually cast as a bland, convenient backdrop—a generic anywhere that doesn't impose its identity like New York.
