It’s perhaps something of a nautically-titled coincidence, the meandering nature and theatrical roots that Drunkboat share with Jack Goes Boating, Philip Seymour Hoffman’s 2010 directorial debut. But both movies represent passion projects ill suited to cinematic adaptation, or at least sludgy, unresolved, mannered and grating in their realized incarnations.

Drunkboat centers around a down-and-out Vietnam veteran and drunkard, Mort Gleason (John Malkovich), who has an epiphany of sorts and returns to his childhood home in the Chicago suburbs, where his sister Eileen (Dana Delaney) still lives with her son and Mort’s other nephew, Abe (Jacob Zachar). She’s at first distrustful and suspicious of his newfound and fragile sobriety, but eventually leaves him in charge of Abe to go on a date out of town. With dreams of busting out of this sleepy one-horse burgh, teenager Abe has dreams of… buying a boat? Yep. And his desires dovetail with the latest scheme of con man and salvage dealer Fletcher (John Goodman), who’s puttied and painted up a heap of wooden maritime garbage with an eye on unloading it for a couple hundred bucks. Abe is interested, but needs an adult signature on the bill of sale.

Drunkboat is directed by Bob Meyer, and co-adapted from his own (apparently semi-autobiographical) stageplay of the same name. Its music occasionally seems to posit that the movie is some sort of vaudevillian comedy, and Fletcher is written as a comedic figure as well. But the movie is a stilted, tonal mishmash, and its insights are spare. Drunkboat toggles listlessly between the conceptual and specific, never successfully translating to screen ideas that might connect more readily on stage, in the abstract.

As an alcoholic ex-poet teetering on the edge of self-destruction, Malkovich is great, lost in a boozy self-reflection laced with notes of pained regret. Naturalistic and reactive, Zachar is also good. But Goodman grates, and the movie invests a regrettable amount of time in his pointless shenanigans. Many other films assay the slippery qualities of drunkenness and repentance in far more arresting fashion. Drunkboat unfortunately just ambles along, in languid fashion. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information on the movie, click here. (Seven Arts/Lantern Lane, PG, 98 minutes)