Jack Goes Boating

The latest film starring Philip Seymour Hoffman marks the directing debut of an actor I’ve always admired. As well as directing, Hoffman plays Jack, a limousine driver in New
York who leads an aimless existence when he isn’t spending time with his best friend, another driver called Clyde (John Ortiz). The plot sounds like a romantic comedy – Clyde and his wife Lucy (Daphne Rubin-Vega) decide to introduce Jack to Lucy’s shy work colleague Connie (Amy Ryan) – but avoids most of the clichés of the rom-com genre.

Jack and Connie regard each other warily, trying to conceal their longing for companionship. The film began life as an Off Broadway play, with three of the four main actors (the newcomer is Ryan) taking the same roles in both productions. Its stage origin is evident in scenes that depend on awkward gestures and minimal dialogue, and Hoffman makes a brave attempt to show blue-collar characters without romanticising or
patronising them.

The film’s focus on the developing relationship between Jack and Connie culminates in a long dinner party scene, when Jack’s promise to cook dinner for Connie at his friends’
apartment goes disastrously wrong. Jack already knows that Clyde and Lucy are
in trouble, enduring a fragile truce after affairs on both sides, but until the
dinner party he accepts that they know more than he does about long-term
relationships. The film is as much about growing apart as getting together, and
it’s a creditable attempt to make something more than a slick, feel-good piece
about sex and love.

With so little happening on screen – there are lengthy scenes at a swimming pool, where Jack is learning to swim so he can take Connie boating in the summer – the film depends on its characters to come alive. And the problem is that Jack, in particular, is too insubstantial to carry so much responsibility. We’re told he has a passion for reggae, reflected in a messy attempt to grow his blond hair into dreadlocks, but it never develops beyond an obsession with one song. Connie fails to understand social boundaries, talking endlessly about her father’s death on a first date, and as the film progresses she starts to appear more disturbed than shy. What seems to be a film about social awkwardness is undermined by the weirdness – not to say unpleasantness, at times – of the main characters.

It may be that Jack is such a blank, inarticulate human being that the film has to endow Connie with major neuroses to explain their attraction to each other. But it’s uncomfortable to observe their relationship, suspecting all the while that Connie – physically much more attractive than Jack – is even more damaged than she initially appears to be. The film runs for only 89 minutes but feels longer, exposing intimate secrets that sit uneasily with the sentimental storyline about Jack trying to improve
himself to win Connie.

Jack Goes Boating is in cinemas from Friday 4 November

 

Britannicus by Jean Racine, in a new translation by Timberlake Wertenbaker

Wilton’s Music Hall, Graces Alley, London E1 8JB

Rome in the mid-first century AD was a place of intrigue and constant danger, especially for anyone who crossed the mercurial teenage emperor Nero. The boy had been adopted by his step-father Claudius after he married his own niece, Nero’s mother Agrippina, and Nero quickly displaced Claudius’s natural son and heir, Britannicus. After Claudius’s death, Nero ascended the throne but fell out with Agrippina, who began to plot on behalf of Britannicus.

This is the tense situation when Britannicus opens on a near-empty stage where abandoned chairs hint at disorder in the imperial palace. Timberlake Wertenbaker’s fluent translation of Racine’s tragedy makes the characters recognisably modern, grappling with the kind of abrupt switches in power familiar from 20th century dictatorships.

So are the performances, from Sian Thomas’s smouldering Agrippina - Margaret Thatcher with more sex appeal – to Matthew Needham’s sulky Nero. Alexander Vlahos plays Britannicus as romantic, unpredictable and trusting, nowhere near a match for his step-mother or a crew of self-interested advisers.

Writing about one of the most famous tyrants in history, Racine cleverly locates his play near the beginning of Nero’s reign, reminding the audience that it began in a spirit of optimism. Britannicus’s death, which he does not forsee, marks the moment when the rest of Nero’s diastrous imperium comes to seem pre-determined, but the play suggests that his weak character could have been nudged in another direction.

This is an absolutely gripping production, performed without an interval, which humanises ancient Rome. It exposes the desperate strategems of Agrippina, who lusts after power but can achieve it only through male relatives whom she secretly holds in contempt. The first century has seldom seemed so compelling, or so close to our own world.

Performances run until Saturday 19 November