“I’m more comfortable being disappointed.”

To hear the review

      Last Chance Harvey, out May 5th from Alliance Films, is the story of two people who have a chance encounter in England and may just be perfect for each other.  Those people are Kate Walker (Emma Thompson) and Harvey Shine (Dustin Hoffman).  Kate works at the airport, doing one of those jobs where she asks travelers to fill out surveys, and Harvey is a jingle writer who is in Europe for his daughter’s wedding.  Both are dissatisfied with their jobs, and both live in their own little shells.  I wonder if their chance meeting will draw them both out of those shells?  I bet it will…

     Thompson and Hoffman both play characters they can do in their sleep.  Thompson is the best actress in the world at playing the attractive but goofy dweeb who is awkward in social situations.  And Hoffman has always been able to play a terrific shambling loser.  And they both do it again in this film.  Harvey is in a bad way.  While in England, he loses his job and his daughter decides she wants her step-father, Brian (James Brolin), to walk her down the aisle instead of her own dad.  We never really learn what has driven Harvey and his daughter so far apart, and it would be nice if the movie plumbed the depths of this relationship a little more.  But it doesn’t.

     Instead, Last Chance Harvey focuses on the brief relationship, over three days, between Thompson (the goofy dweeb) and Hoffman (the shambling loser).  I think I have seen both of them play so many similar characters in so many movies before that I’m unable to really believe this film.  It felt to me like they were playing these characters in different movies, and there was no real connection between the two.  We’re supposed to (I think) feel a powerful connection between the two characters that leads us to believe that they can bring each other out of their shell and shake up their respective malaise.  And I’m not there.

     What we end up getting is a series of awkward conversations between the two, and although those conversations become less awkward over the course of the movie, they never reach the point where I can see this couple together.  I understand what Harvey does for Kate.  He forces her to live a little, to move outside her comfort zone and accept that she can’t control all aspects of her life.  But what she does for him, I’m not sure.  Aside for providing him with some goofy, dweeby arm candy for the reception at his daughter’s wedding, I don’t understand her effect on him.

     The movie even ends with the standard romantic-movie cliche of the last-minute run to the airport, having created the obligatory dramatic will-they-or-won’t-they moment with a pretty trite and easy heart attack device.  Of course, Kate works at the airport, so it’s not that cheesy…but it IS pretty lame.  This is a movie about two fairly uninteresting people who meet and have a fairly uninteresting connection.  I was far more interested in the relationship between Harvey and his daughter, and the relationship between Kate and her strange mother, than I was in the one between Harvey and Kate.  Last Chance Harvey focused on the wrong relationship.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 5th, 2009 at 6:24 am and is filed under 2008, Drama, Dustin Hoffman, Emma Thompson, Joel Hopkins, Romance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.