Jack goes boating

It's heartwarming when actors who don't have classical good looks get top billing in movies. To get it, they need above-average talent, indie productions and modest wage demands. Handsome actors usually don't take roles that make them look far from handsome (exceptions include, very notably, Christian Bale). What's the ratio of handsome to non-handsome Best Actor Oscar winners, I wondered, and found out (later). The next wonderment was obvious: How many handsome actors ever won Best Supporting Actor? (later too)

One star actor in the non-handsome category is fairly obese and facially fattish Philip Seymour Hoffman, the length of whose name is not appealing either for cinema owners. He won the 2005 Best Actor Oscar for Capote (his first nomination); his latest indie is Jack Goes Boating, which he also directed (the best way any actor gets top billing).

Hoffman also co-produced the movie, adapted from a stage play he'd performed in for a six-week season off-Broadway in 2007. Its "opened-out" screenplay was also written by its playwright, ex-actor Bob Glaudini. His chamber drama counterpointed the relationship of a Latino limo driver (ethnic Puerto Rican John Ortiz) with his unfaithful wife (Panama-born Daphne Rubin-Vega) with that of his single white colleague (Hoffman) and the Latina's single white female colleague (they work for an oddball funeral director).

The two Latinos had been in the stage production; Amy Ryan joined Hoffman's movie cast as the fourth lead character. She'd acted alongside him in 2007's blackly comic Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, and was a multi-award-winner and Oscar nominee for supporting actress the same year for Ben Affleck's Gone Baby Gone. A typical indie actress, angular and even more worried looking than Catherine Keener and her ilk, Ryan is far from beautiful, yet she and Hoffman play off their characters' frailties enchantingly.

They are reserved, complexly simple, gauche and a credible middle-ageing working-class pair of misfits. She must learn to trust someone; he must learn how to be the first man to cook her a meal while his Latino friend teaches him how to swim, so that he can take her for a summertime row in Central Park. Their first sexual experience is portrayed with very moving tenderness.

Hoffman indulges in no directorial exhibitionism, letting his fellow actors' body languages enrich the parallel depictions of love and relationships. Fine camera work presents snowy New York as a suitably thrilling and chilling backdrop, embellished by the sensitively-slow-paced editing (Mott Hupfel and Brian Kates respectively, who'd both worked with Hoffman on The Savages in 2007). The only aspect of the film that felt slightly over-blown was the choice of background songs, possibly arising from the Hoffman character's passion for reggae; obtrusive lyrics muddied the characters' dialogue.

The quartet of actors had an ideal showcase, their talents investing the adapted play's theatricality with credibility. Wisely, Hoffman chose a small pond for his first directing effort, and swam well.

*****

Best Actor Oscars:

Cheeringly, since the 1960s, "handsome" actors have won fewer times than might be expected: Denzel Washington, Tom Hanks (twice, but playing an emaciated AIDS victim and a simpleton), Kevin Spacey, Russell Crowe, Daniel Day-Lewis (twice, playing a handicapped man and a madman), Jeremy Irons, Jon Voight.

Best Supporting Actor Oscars:

More "handsome" winners than expected: George Clooney, Cuba Gooding Jr, Spacey and Washington again, Kevin Kline, Sean Connery, Jason Robards (twice), Gig Young, Robert De Niro.

Handsomeness lies in a beholder's eye, of course: some people love Jack Nicholson's looks.