It's always interesting to see what big-name actors decide to do with themselves when they get the chance to direct. Philip Seymour Hoffman appears to have decided to make himself the main character, and to have made that main character relatively pathetic in Jack Goes Boating:
I'm sure he'll be good at this, and I think the choice of learning to swim as the central metaphor for the movie is a pretty good one. I think it's more common than we imagine to not know how to swim, and it's a surprisingly hard thing to learn, and miraculous once you nail it. There are worse metaphors for love and adult living, in any case. But I do think there's an extent to which it's cheating to make yourself a serious loser in a movie like this so the range of possible growth will be so much greater. I'm kind of more interested in Daphne Rubin-Vega (hey, Mimi grows up!) and John Ortiz, if only because I'd kind of rather see people fall and get up than simply rise.
In any case, it's a very different role than the one Tom Hanks selected for himself when he directed for the first time in That Thing You Do! in 1996:
As Mr. White, he was cool, detached, knowledgeable, surviving because to a certain extent, he was a hollow man. But he also largely ceded the stage to his cast. And among other things, he certainly got better work out of Johnathon Schaech than anyone else has before or sense, the best work out of Tom Everett Scott that he did for a while, and Hanks saw the potential in Steve Zahn before a lot of other people did.