Well-Acted Jack a Coldly Aloof Melodrama
Jack (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is an insecure New York limousine driver whose best friend and workmate Clyde (John Ortiz) sets him up on a date with Connie (Amy Ryan), an equally emotionally cloistered woman who just started work in his wife Lucy’s (Daphne Rubin-Vega) office. Even though neither says very much they do seem to hit it off, making plans to go boating during the summer months even though they’re in the middle of winter right now.
Philip Seymour Hoffman in Jack Goes Boating © Overture Films
Based on the play by Robert Glaudini (who also writes the screenplay), Jack Goes Boating is the directorial debut for Academy Award-winning actor Hoffman. Like a lot of actors, the performances he is able to generate from his counterparts are simply wonderful. Everyone here is just great, the film filled with superlative moments – especially from Ortiz and Rubin-Vega – that positively mesmerize.
If only that were enough. Glaudini’s screenplay remains fairly stage bound in many ways, his and Hoffman’s attempts to break things out not really doing a lot to ease the over theatricality of much of the melodrama. Additionally, as great as both the main star and Ryan are, their respective characters are exceedingly threadbare, and while I like a little back-story mystery as much as the next girl there is just so gosh darn much of it where it comes to Jack and Connie trying to decipher it is just way too tiring.
The simple truth is that as moderately straightforward and simplistic as this relatively familiar independent love story is I just never cared whether or not if the pair was going to be able to put aside their respective problems and let themselves become romantically entangled. Their collective idiosyncrasies and pent-up neuroses plum wore me out, and with virtually no hints at all as to where their historical hiccups came from at a certain point it just didn’t matter to me if they were going to be able to overcome them.
Yet Jack Goes Boating is seldom boring, all four actors so outstanding just watching them work together as a unit becomes a singular joy almost unto itself. Ortiz and Rubin-Vega come remarkably close to stealing the picture outright, both Clyde and Lucy just the type of juicy, three-dimensional characters I find worthy of getting excited about. It’s like the pair of them just stepped out of a John Cassavetes drama or darker Woody Allen movie, both of them screaming, laughing, yelling and loving just about perfectly.
Also, strictly from a directorial standpoint Hoffman offers up a few moments of visual ingenuity bordering on the spectacular. As a pretty decent athlete in my High School and collegiate days the idea of visualization (seeing yourself doing a task over and over in your head, like shooting free-throws, to the point it becomes second nature in reality) is one I know quite well. In this case, the things Jack attempts to visualize are tasks like cooking a semi-gourmet dinner and swimming in a pool. Hoffman does a beautiful job of making these into breathless cinematic moments, the film going inside Jack’s head during these visualization moments in a way I found positively spellbinding.
Yet the core problem I had with the picture still stands. I didn’t have stock in Jack and Connie’s romance, didn’t feel the need to invest in them more than microscopically because the film didn’t trust me enough to let me know enough substantive about either of them. Their dialogue sometimes has bite, and their relationship can sometimes sizzle, but both remain such enigmas by the end as they did at the start I never really knew whether or not they’d changed enough for romance between the pair to be a success. Jack Goes Boating is extremely well-acted and full of moments I just adored, it’s just the final product itself that sadly left me cold.
Film Rating: êê1/2 (out of 4)
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