Last Chance Harvey (***1/4)

Never surprising but always charming sums up this semi-comic romance. Dustin Hoffman is the divorced Harvey, and Emma Thompson the late-to-love Kate, an airline employee in London. There American Harvey has arrived for his daughter’s wedding. It is only a question of when and how Harvey and Kate will meet, and what Harvey will do about his job as a composer of jingles, which allows no time for a holiday, let alone a romance.

Rather than boring in its predictability, though, the movie feels comfortable like an old slipper. It’s familiar, but infrequently clichéd or sappy. Writer-director Joel Hopkins has not larded it up with potty-mouthed children, overly horny old people, or wisecracking pals. The only one-liner I noticed was the reference to Kate’s aging mother, who keeps calling during her blind date, as “human contraception.” (I’ve noticed how the cell phone has altered the course of romantic comedy. It has nearly ruined plots about people becoming disconnected—there’s one here that only works to the extent we believe that Kate and Harvey have failed to exchange numbers. Now the cell phone is a marker of annoyance, or of someone who is too busy, rude, or, like Harvey, too disconnected to interact with those in his presence.)

The thing that this movie makes me think is that, generally, speaking, the best romantic comedies are the ones that allow a bit of sadness to creep in. It’s in the forlorn look on Thompson’s face, when Kate feels left out of a conversation with the blind date’s younger acquaintances, or on Hoffman’s as Harvey tries to make conversation when he sees his daughter, who seems more comfortable with her father-in-law to be. The almost inevitable pairing in any romantic comedy represents, ideally, the end of a long stretch of disappointment, perhaps of romantic failure, perhaps of doubt that the happy ending would come, as this movie’s title suggests. It’s why people cry at weddings. Last Chance Harvey certainly isn’t given over to sad moments, but without psychoanalyzing lets us know these characters have known them. Most of all, though, it creates the feeling of serendipitously connecting with someone.

IMDb link

viewed 2/8/09 at AMC Plymouth Meeting; reviewed 2/8–10/09