The Ballad of Jack and Rose (2005)

Synopsis: Jack lives with his daughter Sarah on a semi-inhabited island where he had a hippie commune going in the sixties. He is worried that a housing project being built on the island will compromise its natural equilibrium. Jack is sick and doesn't expect to live long, so he invites his lover and her two sons to live with him and Sarah in the hope that Sarah will get along with them and have some connection with the outside world.
Appraisal: Presumably intended as a melancholic requiem for the hippie ideals of the sixties, this film is loaded with schematism in its plot and characters. Despite this, there are some interesting things being said about sexuality and the consequences of human isolation; if only they could have made it a little less contrived, it might have achieved greatness. Here are some examples of what I am talking about: (1) the change operated on the main character after a certain key event in the movie -- from ultraliberal hippie to Victorian paterfamilias -- is less than believable; (2) the whole check-writing stuff is also quite unbelievable: that is not the way people do things. In both cases, I know that the filmmaker is trying to show some things about these characters, but she should have found more reasonable ways to do it. The film also has some interruptions in the narrative where we see a character brooding, generally against a bucolic landscape, and invariably to the sound of a pop song. Needless to say, these moments of self-indulgence add nothing important or even interesting to the movie, on the contrary. The film's strongest asset is the leading actor; whatever lack of depth is there in the script, his performance makes up for it -- and then some. As a matter of fact, the whole cast delivers worthy performances, and I guess this should be credited partially to the director's work.
Rating: 65