somewhere in paradise; In The Ballad of Jack and Rose, Rebecca Miller proves her mettle as a director of subtle optimism.(Movie Review)

The essence of being human," wrote George Orwell, "is that one does not seek perfection." If anyone should know this lesson by heart, it's surely Rebecca Miller, who has spent decades living with men who never learned it. Not only is she the daughter of playwright Arthur Miller, who has devoted a lifetime to measuring the world against the unyielding yardstick of his leftist principles, but she's married to Daniel Day-Lewis, whose purist approach to acting often appears to have driven him slightly batty-remember when he wanted to forsake his career and become a cobbler? You can feel the weighty presence of both father and husband in her startlingly good new film, The Ballad of Jack and Rose, a moving, often hilarious coming-of-age story about that most American of myths: the loss of paradise.

Day-Lewis plays Jack, a strong-willed dreamer who, back in the sixties, helped set up an island commune dedicated to high-minded causes, from environmentalism to soulfulness. But the dream failed, and he now shares the abandoned property-which remains unsullied by TV and meat, of course-with his teenage daughter, Rose (baby-faced Camilla Belle). Jack is obsessed with protecting Rose from the corrupt outside world, but reality keeps encroaching in the form of real-estate developer Marty Rance (Beau Bridges), who may not want to pave paradise and put up a parking lot but is building a housing tract in the old commune's backyard. Things get even trickier when Jack asks his sometime girlfriend Kathleen (Catherine Keener) to move to the island along with her sons, the sullen troublemaker Thaddius (Paul Dano) and the gentle pudge Rodney (Ryan McDonald), who people think is gay (he's studying to be a hairdresser). Their arrival throws off the delicate balance of island life. Even as Jack struggles madly to keep things under control-like so many apostles of freedom, he wants life to be lived on his own terms-Rose is trying to both escape her father's dominion and reclaim him for herself alone.

Although Miller's first two films, Angela and Personal Velocity, were far from negligible-indeed, the latter nabbed top prize at Sundance four years ago-they felt small, almost deliberately minor. The Ballad of Jack and Rose works the same territory-it's another compassionate portrait of those incapable of fitting smoothly into society- yet it marks an ambitious leap forward. The movie is a triumph of shifting tones and textures, from the poeticized grit of Ellen Kuras's ...