Dir. Philip Seymour Hoffman , USA , 2010, 91 mins
Cast: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Ryan, John Ortiz, Daphne Rubin-Vega
Review by Carol Allen
Jack Goes Boating is a beautifully made film about working class New Yorkers and their lives, which marks prolific actor Seymour Hoffman’s cinematic debut as a director (he’s already well established as a theatre director with the LAByrinth company in New York .)
Jack (Seymour Hoffman) is a shy and lonely man, who drives a limo for a living and spends most of his time hanging out with his friend and co-worker Clyde (Ortiz) and Clyde ’s wife Lucy (Rubin-Vega). The couple set Jack up on a blind date with Connie (Ryan), Lucy’s friend from the funeral parlour where they both work. Although Connie shares Jack’s shyness and awkwardness, their relationship slowly but surely takes off, as Connie encourages Jack to come out of his shell and, amongst other things, he starts to take swimming lessons, so that he’ll be able to fulfill her dream and take her boating on the lake. But as their relationship gently blossoms, Clyde and Lucy’s marriage starts to fall apart.
Although adapted from his own play by writer Bob Glaudini, the film is very cinematically written and imaginatively shot, right from the very first sequence of Jack and Clyde having a conversation in their two limos parked side by side and in the visually poetic way Seymour Hoffman and cinematographer Mott Hupfel handle the scenes of Jack in the swimming pool. The film also creates a very real environment for its characters, with a great sense of the city in which they live – the traffic, the snow on the streets, the way New York itself breathes – while the dialogue and the actors successfully capture the rhythms of the characters’ speech and find a richness in the lives of these ordinary people, who of course aren’t ordinary at all – nobody is. The balance and structure of the two interlocked relationships, one developing and one distintegrating, is very good and the metaphor of the title – Jack learning swimming and boating symbolizing his getting his life and love together – works perfectly without banging you over the head with it.
It’s very sensitively directed and acted and for those of us who are into films about people rather than blockbuster action, this is one for that audience. Both as an actor and a director, Seymour Hoffman scores highly here on both counts.
xx - posted on 23/05/2012 13:13:28
