Big Beach Films, Cooper’s Town Productions, Labyrinth Theater Company
Philip Seymour Hoffman, John Ortiz, Richard Petrocelli, Thomas McCarthy, Amy Ryan, Daphne Rubin-Vega, Lola Glaudini
Jack, (Hoffman) is a limo driver. He has a couple for best friends and they set him up on a blind date. He meets Connie (Amy Ryan) and sparks fly. But everyone in this story is messed up. Jack is very meticulous about every detail. He wants to do exactly right and will work and work and study to do it exactly right. As his relationship blossoms with the shy and inexperienced Connie, his friends relationship is falling apart.
Philip Seymour Hoffman plays some really WEIRD characters. For example, his character Wilson Joel in Love Lisa who huffs gasoline to get high and spends his life driving around flying model airplanes all over the place is a strange one. This guy is really strange too, but I must say perhaps he’s not the strangest person in this story! Anyway, Jack Goes Boating brings the character from the play to the big screen. As such, it’s a dreary little film where the sets and the scenery is not much of the story. Everything is wrapped up in the characters and these characters are well played and well developed. Jack’s best friend Clyde is very close. A little too close sometimes. He constantly tells Jack “I love you” throughout the story. But it seems a genuine caring for a friend and nothing more. Clyde and Lucy are a couple, but as time goes by their relationship is coming apart. They are abusing substances and not letting go of past mistakes. Meanwhile Jack and Connie are hitting it off. Jack hears from Connie that no one has ever cooked for her. Typical of his nature, he goes way overboard. He lives in a room with a hot plate, and never cooked in his life but spends hours and hours taking cooking lessons and practicing the one meal he just has to cook for her because she asked for it. He’s very into details like this! This is an interesting character study, but it didn’t totally catch me on an entertainment level. If I let this go a while, I may come back and raise the rating on it, because it might be actually better than I originally thought of it. But as I thought about this, it seems that only if you’re in the mood for a deep, dark character study, you might enjoy this, but if you want an entertaining movie to spend and evening with, this is not it. Sometimes character studies are really interesting, but these people are all so weird, that I wonder whether I’m wasting my time even caring what happens to them. I’m just not convinced that this was that good of a film and I don’t think I would recommend it, unless of course, you like these kinds of films. Nice try, but it just wasn’t interesting enough to make the time worthwhile.
EdG – EdsReview Dot Com – A Movie Review Blog
