On Movies: Ryan carried along by 'Jack Goes Boating' role

The woman

Amy Ryan

plays in

Jack Goes Boating

- Connie, a single, loveless New Yorker with a job in the basement of a funeral parlor - is so painfully shy and socially maladroit that, for a time in the

Philip Seymour Hoffman

-directed indie, it hurts to watch her.

"It's horrible," Ryan says, laughing. "Poor Connie!"

But then some friends arrange a meeting with the equally awkward and balking Jack - played, with natty dreadlocks and portly girth, by Hoffman - and the two hit it off. Haltingly, with excruciating miscues and miscommunication, they finally connect. And, yes, they even go boating - rowing in a quirky romantic moment across the lake in Central Park.

"It was a no-brainer to do, because it was something that I hadn't really done before," Ryan says of the role, "and it was a chance to work with Phil. But she confused me, too. Clearly, Connie is shy. Clearly, she's alone. Her job makes it evident that she's not a 'people person.' "

At the same time, as the clumsy courtship in the film develops, Ryan's Connie begins to speak her mind with startling frankness when it comes to sex and the couple's relationship.

"She has this kind of unedited version of herself when she talks about what she wants out of love. And, truthfully, I couldn't make sense of that except to say, 'Well, but she does. That's just who she is.'

"And whenever I can't make sense of a character, I just step back and get out of the way. I don't try to get the writer to rewrite her - he wrote it for a reason."

The writer in this case is Bob Glaudini. Originally staged in 2007 at New York's Public Theater, Jack Goes Boating starred Hoffman, John Ortiz and Daphne Rubin-Vega as the couple who do the matchmaking, and Beth Cole as Connie. Hoffman, Ortiz, and Rubin-Vega are all back in the film version, and only Ryan is completely new to the material. She hadn't even seen the stage production.

"I've had that experience in theater where I was replacing someone who went off to do another job," Ryan says, holed up at the Four Seasons Hotel, looking out on the Parkway. "And had I maybe stepped in with five days' notice to join them onstage it would have felt like a frantic catch-up, lots of anxiety, 'Tell me what do I do!'

"But Bob Glaudini, while adapting the screenplay, found that some of the relationships were shifting, and I know in the film the characters of Jack and [Ortiz's] Clyde really grew. Really, it's the third love story in the film, that friendship. And I've heard Daphne describe her experience on the play vs. the film, and she's said that it's as if those characters [hers and Ortiz's] were together two more years, and there's an even bigger strain on their relationship. . . .

"So, for me, we had a two-week rehearsal process, and I remember that first day after we did the read-through, they all started off with questions to Bob, and I'm thinking, 'What's going on here?'

"Then I realized that they had to reinvent this, that they were all reinventing."

Ryan, a native New Yorker who's been working professionally since she left New York's High School of Performing Arts (she was in the 1986 national company of Biloxi Blues, and remembers playing at the Forrest Theatre), has had a string of projects lately with actors-turned-filmmakers. In addition to Hoffman's film-directing debut, which opened Friday at the Ritz at the Bourse, Ryan has completed work on actor/director Tom McCarthy's follow-up to The Visitor. It's called Win Win, in which Ryan stars with Paul Giamatti.

And then there was Ben Affleck's first turn behind the camera, Gone Baby Gone, the 2007 Boston mystery in which Ryan played a strung-out, drugged-up mother whose child has been abducted. Ryan received a supporting-actress Oscar nomination for her hard, edgy performance.

"It's a wonderful thing to have happen to your career, especially after a role like that in Gone Baby Gone. It really was like the icing, the cherry on top. It was enough just having that role, which is so rare. . . . Those roles don't come around very often."

Ryan, 40, lives in Manhattan with Eric Slovin, a comedy writer, and their 11-month-old daughter. The actress appeared as the Baltimore port cop Beatrice "Beadie" Russell in David Simon's landmark HBO series, The Wire, and next month she goes to L.A. to shoot "seven or eight" episodes of The Office, reprising her role of Holly Flax from the show's sixth season.

"I'm not sure what I'm going to do, what they have in store for me," she says. "I'm very excited to see them all again, and there are some new faces I'm going to get acquainted with.

"And Steve Carell is leaving at the end of the season, and there's been a lot of talk about who is going to replace him. That's the million-dollar question."

This month, Ryan will be found on another innovative TV series: She replaces Dianne Wiest as Gabriel Byrne's shrink in HBO's addictive and voyeuristic therapy-session show, In Treatment.

"It was an opportunity to sit with a great actor, Gabriel Byrne, and go through these almost mini-one-act plays," she says.

And so Ryan, Oscar-nominated and Tony-nominated (Uncle Vanya, A Streetcar Named Desire), moves happily, and steadily, between film and television and theater.

"I never really had a prejudice of one medium over the other. A long time ago, film actors never dared set foot in television, but the rules have just changed so much."

"And anyway," she adds, chuckling again, "TV is going to be outmoded soon, right? Everything is going to be online, on your smart phone."