Jack Goes Boating

Directed by Philip Seymour Hoffman. Starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Ryan, John Ortiz, Daphne Rubin-Vega Club, IFI, Dublin; QFT, Belfast, 91 min

CONNIE (Ryan), a lonely, frigid mortician’s secretary, lies beside Jack (Hoffman), a lonely limousine driver. Their romantic evening has not, evidently, gone according to plan. “In a bath tub, I imagined I was with you,” she says. “You took a bath?” “No, I was in a bath tub imagining it was a pitch-black night. We were in a bed in a spaceship flying through superspace.”

Elsewhere Jack’s BF and co-worker Clyde (Ortiz) is holding himself together with denial and cannabis. His marriage to Lucy (Rubin-Vega) is burning out just as Jack and Connie’s relationship blossoms. This diptych and two meagre subplots wherein Jack learns to swim and cook form the basis of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s disappointing directorial debut.

Jack Goes Boatingbegan life as an off-Broadway production and, goodness, it shows. Where else but off Broadway might one encounter characters who refuse to leave the stage when a dinner party descends into blazing rows and marital breakdown? Where else do stilted conversations between improbable semi-functioning New Yorkers pass as entertainment? It probably made perfect sense on a dingy bohemian stage but it rarely works as cinema. A screen adaptation by playwright Robert Glaudini and the retention of most of the original theatrical cast make for a mannered spectacle. Even the Grizzly Bear soundtrack can't convince us we're watching an indie film.

Philip Seymour Hoffman and his co-stars throw everything at their characters but the dialogue and halting rhythms are so ill-suited to the medium, it’s like watching Lionel Messi enter a horse race.