The Ballad of Jack and Rose

Herald rating: * * *

As an actor, Daniel Day Lewis exhibits a detachment from stardom - and even from regular work - that verges on the heroic. Once an Oscar winner - for My Left Foot in the late 80s - and twice more a nominee, he hasn't made a picture since Martin Scorsese and Harvey Weinstein badgered him into playing Bill the Butcher in Gangs of New York.

Despite the staggering versatility he displayed on his 1985 double debut - Johnny in My Beautiful Laundrette and Cecil Vyse in A Room With A View were released almost simultaneously - he has remained aloof from opportunity, starring in a scant 10 films since, and spending several years training as a "cobbler" (his word) in Florence.

It took his wife, who wrote and directed this odd and oddly affecting neo-gothic family drama, to lure him back.

Miller is the daughter of the late playwright Arthur Miller, so the film's central theme - a young woman's struggle to emerge from the shadow of her domineering and charismatic father - was presumably familiar territory for her.

The father and daughter in this case are the title's Jack and Rose who live - together and alone - on an island off the coast of the northeastern United States, where they are the diehard last survivors of a 70s commune.

Their intense affection for each other is obvious - in the early stages, Miller fudges the issue of whether their relationship is carnal.

Jack is determined to protect her from the "plastic" polluted world on the mainland.

But when a tacky developer (Bridges) and then Jack's girlfriend Kathleen (Keener) and her two sons invade their Eden, Rose's aspirations collide with her father's anxiety.

It is an old story template - there are echoes of Miller's titanic A View from The Bridge - and Miller handles the claustrophobic family scenes well.

But the story is slightly cluttered and Jack's illness - in any case a bit too heavily symbolic - drives events in the film's final quarter, which feel forced.

There are some annoying improbabilities too, mostly concerning the developer's willingness to endure random acts of mayhem and vandalism.

But finally it's an affecting elegy for a lost era and Day Lewis' performance is both powerful and well-modulated.

Cast: Daniel Day Lewis, Catherine Keener, Camilla Belle, Beau Bridges
Director: Rebecca Miller
Running time : 111 minutes
Rating: M (offensive language, sexual references)
Screening: Academy
Verdict: Daniel Day Lewis is masterful as a diehard hippie in only his second film in a decade, an occasionally clunky drama written and directed by his wife.