Film review: Last Chance Harvey

Published on Friday 29 May 2009 13:08

LAST CHANCE HARVEY (12A)

Director: Joel Hopkins

Running time: 92 minutes

FOR such a small film, Last Chance Harvey is full of tall orders: not least that Dustin Hoffman and Emma Thompson could form a couple and fall in love. In the real world, this relationship is like a meerkat trying to mate with a giraffe. It can be done, I suppose, but is it really worth the climb?

Written and directed by Joel Hopkins, this wisp of a story has Hoffman as Harvey Shine, a New York jingle writer who's in danger of being fired. Indeed, his boss has practically told him that he's on his last chance just before Harvey flies out to London for his daughter's wedding.

Things are no brighter in Britain, where his horrid serpent's tooth of an offspring has not only arranged for him to be billeted as far from the wedding as possible, but has asked her strapping urbane stepfather (James Brolin) to give her away instead of Harvey.

Finally he bails, and ends up in a bar beside tired opinion pollster Kate Walker (Emma Thompson), who has problems of her own that add up to a dull job, no boyfriend and a busybody mother (Eileen Atkins) who just won't quit. Harvey forces her to join him in a conversation and quickly decides cagey Kate is his last chance for romance.

You may wonder how many more twinkly, not-so-bad-after-all roles Dustin Hoffman feels he has to make to rebut his difficult reputation. In the last year he has played a cute but wily red panda in Kung Fu Panda, a gruff but good-hearted rat in The Tale Of Despereaux and the kind of excessively avuncular uncle figure you wouldn't leave your child alone with in Mr Magorium's Wonder Emporium. We may yet see him as Santa Claus.

Emma Thompson, on the other hand, is grand. I haven't always been a fan of her fussy style but Thompson's brittle cheeriness works well here. In one scene Kate ends up on an unlikely blind date with a younger man who quickly starts eyeing up a younger prospect. It's a situation that Hopkins engineers for maximum humiliation but which Thompson renders poignant as her initial hopefulness dissolves into resignation.

With two such crafty leads, it's hard not to be beguiled by some of Last Chance Harvey. It's also something of a relief to have a romantic comedy that doesn't feature Kate Hudson, Matthew McConaughey or a woman falling over a lot. Yet every time you try to give in to it, some piece of the film's clumsy plotting machinery clanks distractingly. For instance, would any real person take the huff so violently over a missed date that they refuse to hear the other person's excuse, and end an otherwise promising relationship? Has the comedic sub-plot about Kate's suspicious mother and her busy Polish neighbour wandered in from another film entirely? And is Hopkins really going to give Thompson a dressing-up montage, where she tries on cocktail dresses to an upbeat soundtrack, la Pretty Woman? Why yes, I fear he is.

Much of Last Chance Harvey seems so predestined that the film leaks tension like an old party balloon. Its chief novelty is the ages of the stars (Thompson is 50, Hoffman is 71) – not that either of them refer to the age gap. Yet Hopkins seems to think he's created Before Sunrise for a Horlicks generation, allowing Hoffman and Thompson to wander a geographically rearranged London, comparing regrets and ambitions. Harvey reveals he had once hoped to become a jazz musician. "Were you any good?" she asks. "Not good enough," he replies, but still tries to woo her with one of his compositions. Run, Kate. Run while you still can.

This film has been made with the best of intentions but it appears to suggest that oldies can fall for each other in the same simple manner as young people: a) I don't believe that, and b) what kind of smarter, older woman can be bought with a frock anyway? At her age, someone as savvy as Emma Thompson can buy her own damn dresses.

On general release from Friday

www.lastchanceharvey.com