Philip Seymour Hoffman does eccentric really, really well. Whether he's starring as a villain in a blockbuster like Mission Impossible III or taking a turn as Capote, he's bound to have brought his own sense of weird to the character. Directing himself in the big screen version of Jack Goes Boating, which he'd already starred in off-Broadway, he brings a sympathetic eye to a character who might otherwise just be odd, forcing us to root for Jack to find true love.

Each of the four main characters in Hoffman's latest are flawed, hurting characters. Jack is a forty-something limo driver who has never found true love because he has never really tried to date. His best friend, Clyde (John Ortiz), wants him very badly to find someone he can care about, but his own romanticized view of his marriage to Lucy (Daphne Rubin-Vega) gets in the way of his helping Jack. And then there is Connie (Amy Ryan) who longs to love and be loved but can't make herself trust, a problem compounded by her victimization on the subway.

A fifth character might be the city itself which allows the characters to move freely but also stifles their ability to form real relationships and to trust. Clyde and Lucy have their own mistrust, built on fear and past experience within the relationship, but their busy hectic lives as urbanites only seem to hamper their love even further. Of course, Jack is the one who seems the most open, the one willing to do the most searching, and his love for Connie is metaphorically developed parallel to his learning to swim.

Connie wants Jack to take her boating but as terrified as he is of love, he's more scared of the water because he can't swim. As we watch Clyde teach Jack to swim, we see a man who is willing to struggle with his own demons and shortcomings, who is willing to become vulnerable so that he might learn to love. We might not like Jack or some of the things he does, but in his pursuit of love, he is pure because he is willing to sacrifice himself and become vulnerable to let love in. Phrases like "you have to give love to get love" spring to mind, but it's Jack's sacrifice of his own pride, needs, and fears to allow love to work that make the movie applicable to our lives.

It says in one of Paul's letters to the churches in the New Testament that we were not given a spirit of timidity, and elsewhere, that perfect love drives out all fear. Jack learns not to be afraid of the water as he learns not to be afraid to love Connie; that parallel seems simple in writing, but is shown to be real and complex as we watch it play out on film. Love isn't always easy, it isn't always fun, but in the end, love conquers those things which stand in our way if we will stand aside of ourselves and let it.