Movie Review: <em>Jack Goes Boating</em>
By Bill Wine
KYW Newsradio
What we get when Philip Goes Directing for the first time is Jack Goes Boating. The result? A movie in miniature that doesn't exactly sail away with our unbridled affection or enthusiasm, but that doesn't capsize or sink either.
Jack Goes Boating, the subdued directorial debut of Oscar-winning actor Philip Seymour Hoffman (best actor for 2006's Capote), is an intimate and unusual character-driven comedy about the fledgling romance between two blue-collar New Yorkers.
Hoffman also stars as a shy, inarticulate, unkempt, anxiety-prone New York City limousine driver who works for his uncle and meets and demurely, patiently woos a woman as retiring and committed to the shallow end of the pool as he is.
His married best friends, Clyde and Lucy, played by John Ortiz and Daphne Rubin-Vega, introduce him to Connie, a colleague of Lucy's at the Brooklyn funeral parlor at which they both work. She's played by Amy Ryan (an Oscar nominee for best supporting actress in 2007 for Gone Baby Gone), as a woman justifiably paranoid about new men, having had her share of upsetting experiences with liberty-taking men, including her boss and a stranger on the subway.
Jack and Connie get to know each other and proceed slowly and carefully, he respectful of her fears, she interested but wary, yet hopeful when she senses his gentleness and sensitivity.
Then she casually mentions that she would like to go boating on the lake in Central Park.
Wanting to improve himself in a way that pleases her, Jack -- who cannot swim -- immediately starts taking swimming lessons at the local pool (from Clyde) so that he will be prepared if they do take to the lake and the worst happens.
Jack also volunteers to cook a special meal for Connie when she mentions that no one but her mother has ever done that for her. So he also begins taking cooking lessons from the head pastry chef at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel who, Jack unhappily learns, is a threatening source of jealously and discomfort in the marriage of Clyde and Lucy.
Which means that the seemingly satisfying and secure union of Jack's closest friends appears to be unraveling just as his newfound stab at romance and intimacy is getting off the ground.
Is this counterpoint a sign? A bad omen? A warning? Maybe.
Anyway, the bridge over their troubled waters seems to be swaying precariously. And it will be tested again when Jack hosts a climactic dinner party for the four of them.
Jack Goes Boating is an honorable adaptation of an off-Broadway play by Bob Glaudini, who wrote the film's screenplay, that Hoffman, Ortiz, and Rubin-Vega appeared in. The three of them reprise their stage roles and they're joined by Ryan in an ensemble that features four impressively lived-in performances.
The stage origins of the piece are obvious throughout, and are both a strength and a weakness. That is, the film is undeniably stagebound, but it is also gratifyingly nuanced, offering telling verbal and behavioral details that help bring the four characters, their relationships, and their ordinary, slice-of-working-class lives to verisimilar life.
Hoffman's quartet of actors are a big part of the reason why that's the case, this being an actors' movie, and they deliver the goods, none more so than the appealing Ryan, whose nuanced and empathetic Connie not only seems genuine in every way but who gets a maximum of attention with a minimum of gesticulation.
But let's not overpraise PSH's JGB. In the slice-of-life Marty mold, it's played in a minor chord and offers modest grown-up pleasures for the appreciative viewer. Little movies this heartfelt and skilled and idiosyncratic, that travel their own road and don't resort to easy thrills or laughs or shocks, deserve an audience.
So we'll order a limo for 2½ stars out of 4 for a likable kitchen-sink romantic comedy, a four-hander that celebrates the "little people" -- the damaged and awkward little people. Effective emoting will have you voting for Jack Goes Boating.