The titular character in “Jack Goes Boating” spends less time plying
his oars in the Central Park lake as drifting comfortably in a numb,
liquid womb of dinner parties, cassette tape reggae and warm chlorine.
Jack (played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, who also directs) is an aging overweight limo
driver with white-blond half dreads clamped down by those stiff old
plastic Walkman headphones no one’s worn since the ’90s.



Boating would be a high-speed, guns-a-blazing car chase for this
movie. But instead, there’s a lot of wine pouring, a lot of people who
have Manhattan figured out to the point that they can tool around in
limos and live expansively in huge apartments with views and still
have money leftover for expensive hash, sold in grams, and
octopus-like hookahs to smoke it out of. Jack’s friend, a long-term
married dude, sets him up on a blind date. His date, Connie, is a
third of his size (it’s Amy Ryan, who plays Holly, Michael Scott’s
love interest, in the American version of “The Office”) and there’s no
reason she should like him, but hey, this is the land of bloated,
not-trying-anymore men who land sparkling-eyed, fit, thin,
dewy-skinned ingenues. For no reason, except perhaps an imaginary,
stage play-like sense that they might be able to mumble out a few
heartfelt lines.



Writer Robert Glaudini, in his first effort, has figured out how to
write down strange fragments of modern conversation, like the daughter
of a former hospice patient talking about “the coma room,” or Jack’s
friend’s wife calling a grief expert “the death guy.” These are cutesy
details, and they don’t overcome the recoiling disgust that ripples
throughout the script when it comes to people’s relations, the friend
telling Jack that as soon as anything tarnishes the innocence of his
new relationship, “you will have vivid images, and know that they will
recur probably forever.” Like, who says that?



“Jack Goes Boating” is as disappointing a movie as Jack should be to
Connie. She grins and bears it. We shouldn’t. Hoffman’s Jack makes
“The Big Lebowski’s” Dude look positively action hero material.
Connie’s not much better. She’s a lovely woman, but she provides the
same services as a prostitute, just on less of a schedule and for no
price. “You can stop if you want to,” she tells Jack as he touches
her. Then, trying to mold herself to whatever he wants, she says,
“What do you want to see in a woman?”



And despite these gruesome depictions of bloodless human relations,
when Glaudini attempts to create tension, passion, the necessary
irritation of love between his characters, he’s mute. He makes a man
attack Connie on the subway, giving her a blood-gushing face and a few
fractured ribs as she sits at her desk, trying to work. Jack’s
inadequacies can be fixed by, can you believe this, lap-swimming
lessons and cooking classes. Connie’s big scary admission? She has a
sexual fantasy that involves a man in space. Their hearts may pound
with these efforts, but like other recent crummy, sludgy, boredly
bourgeois efforts like “Please Give” and “The Kids Are Alright,”
there’s nothing to make the audience’s supposed to do the same.



There’s a part, early on in the movie, where Jack’s friend parks his
limo outside of the Waldorf to use the bathroom. He is chagrined when
he tries to pay the attendant in coins. As he leaves, he slows, then
stops, then enters a formal event in one of the hotel’s ballrooms. For
a second, we think we’re about to see the moment where he changes,
where he takes some radical path that will show him why complacency is
death. He walks away. He doesn’t take the opportunity. Neither does
the movie.



Ashley O’Dell reviews movies that aren’t in the theater anymore. She lives in North Hollywood, near the In-N-Out Burger.