Film review: Last Chance Harvey

Published on Thursday 4 June 2009 19:02

LAST CHANCE HARVEY (12a) ** DIRECTED BY: JOEL HOPKINS STARRING: DUSTIN HOFFMAN, EMMA THOMPSON, JAMES BROLIN

GIVEN that romance movies are, generally speaking, designed to appeal more to women than men, it's surprising what a raw deal their female protagonists often get.

If they're not being reduced to mewling, materialistic, marriage-and-baby-obsessed morons (see any recent Hollywood rom-com), you can be sure they'll be presented as candidates for spinsterhood whose best shot at happiness will be with a man old enough to be their father.

The latter is certainly true of Last Chance Harvey, which finds Emma Thompson batting eyelids with 73-year-old Dustin Hoffman. Thus, even though the title suggests that this corny and contrived weeper is all about Hoffman's character facing up to the fact that he's running out of time to find love, it somehow leaves you with the impression that it's really the character Thompson plays, a lonely woman that fate throws in his path, who is in the more pitiable position.

After all, Thompson is a smart, attractive, witty woman, and her character, Kate, is all of those things, too. Yet the film strives to present her as a bit of a lost cause. She has an overbearing mother with whom she spends far too much time, mostly allaying her concerns over the activities of her Polish neighbour, who, in a truly groan-inducing, time-padding subplot, her mother suspects of being a serial killer. She also has friends, a decent enough job, reads books, can engage in intelligent conversation and has a nice line in self-deprecating humour, but still the film chooses to humiliate her early on by sending her on a cringe-inducing blind date with a (not that much) younger man.

Presumably this is so we'll sigh with relief (rather than shudder with horror) when Hoffman's twinkly-eyed Harvey hits on her in an airport lounge. He's a divorced jazz pianist, who is struggling to hold on to his job as a New York-based jingles writer while en route to his daughter's wedding in London. Arriving in Heathrow harassed, almost immediately he's unwittingly rude to Kate, a ground-staff airline employee who spends her days trying to coerce newly arrived passengers to fill out surveys. Harvey has no time for such things, and neither does the film, spiriting him off instead to a disastrous family reunion, where he discovers that his daughter (who is young enough to be his granddaughter) has asked her stepfather (James Brolin) to give her away on her big day.

Suitably crushed, and with his employment situation critical, he decides to skip the wedding reception and return to New York on an earlier flight. That's the film's cue to let Harvey and Kate meet properly – though, thanks to the fact that writer/director Joel Hopkins has already spent so much time cutting back-and-forth between both of their lonely lives, by the time we reach this point there's no chance of them not being perfect for each other, and even less chance of them not ending up together.

Even so, Hoffman and Thompson go through the motions of pretending that falling for each other may prove more complicated than the film has any intention of allowing it to be, and it's in these moments that Last Chance Harvey offers up its few small pleasures. Yes, as unfair as it seems to saddle Thompson's character with a man who can't even climb a few stairs without his ticker threatening to give way (surely she's too young to be condemned to the companionship end of the lonely hearts market?), she manages to invest Kate with a vitality lacking in the script.

With good grace, she digs deep to give us a sense of a woman who has suffered a lot of heartache in her life, and even though the film's lazy plot mechanics and cornball dialogue often work against her, she does her best to convince us that Kate isn't just settling for Harvey to avoid loneliness; she sees a genuine chance for a fulfilling life with him.

Her job is made slightly easier in this respect by the fact that even a septuagenarian Hoffman has enough charisma to remain an alluring presence on screen. He may shamelessly milk his movie-star magic here – especially during the tearful, impromptu, from-the-heart speech Harvey gives his daughter after Kate persuades him to return to her wedding reception – but such things go a long way to papering over the deficiencies of such ambitionless film-making.

And this really is uninspired stuff. With its contracted timeline and walking-and-talking date structure (all the usual London tourist sights are covered), this could have been a baby-boomer spin on the kind of fast-forged romantic splendour found in the likes of Before Sunrise or In Search of a Midnight Kiss. It could have riffed on Hoffman's legacy as Benjamin Braddock, the "bright young man" from The Graduate, ruminating on the constant struggle to find happiness and fulfilment faced by the first generation to actively reject their parents' and society's value system. It could have explored and interrogated – rather than simply accepting – the double standard that suggests that women over the age of 40 are fit only for geriatric men who are presumably too old to pull 20- or 30-year-olds. But, instead, it's just another transatlantic rom-com, happy to amble along on the chemistry of its stars. Last Chance Harvey is too lightweight to be annoying, but it's too formulaic to be memorable and too safe to be in any way meaningful.