'Jack Goes Boating': Sad-sack heaven

Actor Philip Seymour Hoffman makes his feature directing debut with "Jack Goes Boating," a slight, downbeat romantic comedy with a cast nearly good enough to keep afloat in a lake of whimsy.

Hoffman, in the title role, and co-star John Ortiz reprise their performances from screenwriter Bob Glaudini's Off-Broadway play. They are New York limo drivers, working-class stiffs who probably aren't destined for better things. Jack, in particular, seems hopeless - a likable (enough) loser, overweight, pasty, his hair matted in nascent dreadlocks.

Hope comes to Jack via his best pals, a bickering, seemingly doomed married couple (Ortiz and Daphne Rubin-Vega, both excellent) who introduce their third wheel to the lonely, neurotic Connie (Amy Ryan).

It's a match made in sad-sack heaven. When Connie mentions that no one has ever cooked her a meal or taken her rowing on the Central Park lake, Jack does what anyone in a quirky indie romance would do: Studies cooking under a top chef and learns to swim.

The logic behind Jack's binge of self-improvement (really, wouldn't life jackets and a nice pasta salad do the trick?) goes unexamined, perhaps for fear of disrupting the film's deliberate tone of fanciful hipness. Ortiz, Ryan and, especially, Rubin-Vega help anchor things with some New York grit, even when a blubbering Hoffman sends Jack overboard.