(rated R) Rebecca Miller, daughter of famed playwright Arthur Miller, directs and writes a story starring her husband, Daniel Day Lewis, who she met on the set of her father’s play “The Crucible”. In his first role since “Gangs of New York” Lewis takes on another of his bizarre characters, this time as Jack, a hippy dad living on a leftover commune where he raises his daughter Rose (Camilla Belle). Sheltered from the influence of the outside world, Belle is perfectly cast as a believable and innocent virgin, with an angel-like purity. But that’s not the problem. It’s hard to sympathize with a man who wants the best for his child by isolating her from the real world. Just what kind of a father moves his child to a remote island to live in one of those “in the ground energy houses”? And, then to add chaos to insanity, invites his wayward lover (a well cast Catherine Keener) to move in with her two teenaged sons. The jealousy that Rose will display over this new woman invading her father’s space all makes sense, it’s a father who fights mother-nature by stifling his daughter her entire life, that really has unacceptable issues. Afterall, the world’s progress can’t be stopped in order to shield one child.
