Philip Seymour Hoffman's Jack Goes Boating (2010)

Philip Seymour Hoffman takes the lead role in Jack Goes Boating, which is also the first movie that he has directed. There are just four central characters – Jack (played by Hoffman) and his good friend Clyde (John Ortiz), who both drive limos for Jack's uncle; and Clyde's wife Lucy (Daphne Rubin-Vega) and her office work colleague Connie (Amy Ryan). Jack is 45, is emotionally immature, and has probably only had two brief relationships in his life ('tops', says Hoffman the director), and Connie seems a very wounded animal, although apparently a number of women have seen her as a just about average middle-aged single female New Yorker.

The plot revolves around Jack's 'parents' Clyde and Lucy (although all four are about the same age) devising a plan to bring Jack and Connie together, although their task would be far easier if their friends carried less psychological clutter. Plus, Jack learns that Connie wants to go boating, and then promises to cook her a meal. As he can't swim or cook, Clyde arranges the cooking lessons and teaches him to swim himself.

Water is a strong motif throughout the movie, and it is one of the main ways that Jack undergoes a kind of baptism into greater normality. Water is in the title of his favorite song, the original 'Rivers of Babylon' by the Melodians, a Rastafarian 'positive vibe' according to Jack, with words based on a psalm in the Bible about the exiled Jews lovingly remembering their homeland. And the movie toys with the song several times, as in its use as a kind of healing device when Jack lends Connie his Walkman when she's in hospital recovering from an attack, but also ironically when Clyde throws the machine at the wall and the music gushes out over the ruins of the important dinner Jack has made – and over the ruins of Clyde and Lucy's marriage.

In the end everything's changed – in the middle of his life, Jack walks off with Lucy into an unknown future, although at least they've made the choice to risk whatever ecstasies or agonies love will bring them, as opposed to their former relatively safe but numb singledom. But – another irony – matchmaker Clyde faces midlife alone.

The movie was adapted from Bob Glaudini's 2007 off-Broadway production of the same name, although several critics also mention its resemblance to a film that's new to me – Delbert Mann's Marty (1955), which was based on Paddy Chayefsky's eponymous teleplay, and also concerns two outsiders who are clumsily groping toward a hitherto far distant vision of togetherness.

I was drawn to the similarity of the title to Jacques Rivettes's 1974 classic Céline et Julie vont en bateau (Céline and Julie Go Boating), which may or may not be intentional.* Is it stretching things a bit if I draw an inverse analogy between Céline and Julie's eating the magic candy leading to a Proustian epiphany, and the foursome's sucking on a hookah and inducing memory loss? Probably, but it's a fun idea.

This movie deserved far more, er, 'positive vibes' from the critics. (There are few lovely songs from The Fleet Foxes too.)

*Purely as an additional point of interest, the imaginary 7 bis, rue du Nadir-aux-Pommes in Céline and Julie Go Boating seems to have become as cultish an address as the also imaginary 11 rue Simon-Crubellier in George Perec's novel La Vie, mode d'emploi (Life: A User's Manual).

Mike Leigh's Another Year

I posted my reaction to Mike Leigh's last movie, Happy-Go-Lucky (2008), not that long ago, and now Leigh's Another Year (2010), which must be one of his best films to date, quietly explodes on the screen.

I watched it at Broadway in Nottingham, England. Almost forty years before, at the same movie theater that was then called Nottingham Film Theatre, I saw Bleak Moments (1971), the first movie by the then unknown Mike Leigh. The added bonus at the time I went there (a Saturday evening, I believe) was that Leigh himself appeared on stage to answer questions that the audience asked him about the movie they'd just watched. I found his answers fascinating, but the film itself much more so: Leigh's improvisational techniques - essentially beginning with a skeletal script and having the cast struggle their way through the dialog within those vague parameters - seemed to come from another, experimental world.

But Bleak Moments is basically just about two people, two shy people, incapable of expressing themselves, of transcending their own psychological constraints. Once more, we're in the same world as Jacques Brel's 'Les Timides' (who blush, tremble, and want to do so much more but dare not), or Morrissey's 'Ask' (where 'Shyness can stop you/From doing all the things in life/You'd like to'). The world where the shy dwell is perhaps the last territory that political correctness hasn't breached. But it is a kind of social illness, and social illness remains an area that Mike Leigh is still investigating.

But Another Year ('closer to death', to continue the unfinished phrase) isn't about shyness as such. It's about the ageing process, or perhaps more exactly the effects of the ageing process. It's about the need for love, and is otherwise Houellebecqian in depicting the sex-contented and the sex-discontented. Or, er, whatever.

Tom (a geological engineer) and Gerri (an NHS counselor), both perhaps in their early sixties, are happily married both emotionally and (it is once suggested) sexually, and they entertain a few friends, one of whom is Mary, a secretary who works at the same place as Gerri, and they've known one another for twenty years. Mary has had relationships, but they have failed, and she is now reduced to sponging off the sympathy of Tom and Gerri, testing it to its limits as she paradoxically camouflages her desperation in alcohol abuse. She longs for a kind of relationship with Tom and Gerri's son Joe - who is twenty years younger - and then she feels great jealousy when he finds a girlfriend. Hungover after buying champagne with the paltry sum of money she's received for the scrap metal value of a car she's just written off, she invites herself into Tom and Gerri's home, and asks a stranger - Tom's bereaving brother Ronnie - if he wants a cuddle. The desperate lives Leigh's characters lead aren't always quiet, and anyway Leigh's silences often deafen.

Toward the end, Tom and Gerri's future daughter-in-law Katie - a little like the optimist Poppy in Happy-Go-Lucky - exchanges necessary but essentially meaningless introductory pleasantries with Ronnie, but the camera doesn't show the faces of those speaking - only the dark clothes of the lower part of their bodies as the focus remains firmly on the hopeless expression of Mary. Just as the final scene shows the family in animated conversation as the camera pans from the insiders, through to the silent Ronnie, then rests on Mary's face. The talking is silenced as the camera, for a painful number of seconds, forces the viewer to dwell on the vacancy.

Mike Leigh continues to explore the world of outsiders. Whether they be young and shy - or ageing and angst-ridden.

Mike Leigh: Happy-Go-Lucky (2008)

The film director Mike Leigh was perhaps originally best known for his BBC Plays for Today Nuts in May (1976) and, perhaps above all, Abigail's Party (1977). I had the privilege of seeing Mike Leigh answer questions about his first feature film, Bleak Moments (1971), at Broadway, Nottingham, which in those days was called the Nottingham Film Theatre. I was greatly impressed by Bleak Moments as it is a study in almost pathological shyness, and I can't think of anyone (apart from Jean Rhys in the world of fiction) who had previously dealt with such a subject, although there must, I imagine, be many – yes, hello, Kafka.

But – long after Morrissey of The Smiths had turned shyness and other odd traits into a badge of outsiderdom – Leigh continues to portray not necessarily shy characters, but those who are somehow out of kilter with what many automatically perceive as consensus reality. Leigh's Life Is Sweet (1991) mainly concerns an unemployed man who buys a clapped-out mobile fast food van in any attempt to make a living, and his friend, a non-family man with visions of becoming a celebrity chef by opening a restaurant called 'The Regrette Rien' after his idol Edith Piaf. These ventures are of course doomed to failure, as were the ventures of so many victims of Thatcher's insane ideas about people getting rich quick on the proceeds of their redundancy money - often by establishing businesses built on their own obsessions - from the industries that her government had in effect terminated.

Wendy (Alison Steadman), in Life Is Sweet , comments towards the end of the film that her husband Andy (Jim Broadbent) has not given up. I understand that what Jim has not given up is life, which their anarchist and probably anorexic daughter Nicola (Jane Horrocks) appears to treat with almost suicidal disdain.

Happy-Go-Lucky was seen by some reviewers as a somewhat more optimistic Leigh, although Poppy (Sally Hawkins) still seems, to me at least, to be deferring thinking by side-lining it, evading it, pretending it doesn't exist. But then, isn't that what so many people do all the time? How many of us have seen – in other people's houses – the ever-present TV set that acts as wallpaper to prevent any thinking from taking place? Mike Leigh remains a major figure of British cinema.