Jack Goes Boating

Following Philip Seymour Hoffman's untimely death last month, I thought I'd take a look at his films that I hadn't seen before. I found out that he had made a lot of films in a relatively short time span, and that I'd seen most of them, which tells me he had a good eye for material.

The one film that he directed was Jack Goes Boating, released in 2010. It also stars Hoffman in the title role, a sad sack limo driver who embarks on a tentative romance with another sad sack (Amy Ryan) while the relationship between his best friend and his wife fall apart.

Hoffman, in many of the eulogies in print on on the Web, was proclaimed the greatest actor of his generation, which I think is a bit of hyperbole, especially since I didn't hear much of that while he was alive. In the last few years he branched out, but for much of his career he played a similar kind of role, perhaps because of his body type. He was frequently the slumping slacker type, a victim of the unmerciful universe. When it came time to direct a film, he gave himself perhaps the ultimate of this type, as Jack is a guy who doesn't seem to have much going on for himself.

The film, adapted from a play by Bob Gaudini, does give Jack the chance for growth. We are led to believe that his relationship with Ryan is a first, and he endeavors to better himself, learning to swim and to cook. But in an overwrought finale in which he attempts to cook a meal, everything falls apart.

Jack Goes Boating is a low-key, hipster kind of movie (the music is by Brooklyn hipster band Grizzly Bear) and wears well in its brief ninety minutes. The performances are good, especially John Ortiz and Daphne Rubin-Vega as Jack's friends. For the audience, Hoffman's death is saddest when we think of what he could have done, as in films like The Master he broke free of the sad sack image. He was working on a second directing job when he passed, it would have been interesting to see what he could have done with it.