film last chance harvey review

My review of the new Dustin Hoffman/Emma Thompson appears in trunctated form in today's Echo. Read the full review here.....

Middle age isn't much fun for the protagonists in this gentle Richard Curtis-lite comedy romance.
Not until a chance meeting throws together American dinosaur jingle writer Harvey Shine and world-weary, 40-something English singleton Kate Walker that is.
Dustin Hoffman is the Harvey of the title, who we first see as a mousy man feeling hopelessly crushed by life, while Emma Thompson wears an air of accepted disappointment as the statistic-gathering invisible woman.
Their lives are, frankly, rubbish but a colliding of their worlds (after a series of predictable cinematic near misses) leads to a change of outlook, and of fortune, for both of them.
There's not much that's original about writer/director Joel Hopkins' story, which sets out to celebrate new beginnings, but it has a warm heart to it and it's refreshing to see older actors getting their chance to lead a rom-com.
Harvey is in London to see his estranged daughter get married but he's torn between wanting to make it up with her - despite the ghastly, self-satisfied Americans who seem to make up the wedding party - and keep his dead-end job in New York.
Rather predictably it all goes pear shape, but the film's rom-com formula means you know there's a happy ending somewhere around the corner.
Last Chance Harvey tries to get away from the glossy London travelogue of similar fare - we see the less glamorous side of Heathrow, bog standard pubs and the top deck of buses.
But it can't quite bear let go all together.
Thompson's Kate may live in Willesden Green but her mum (a lovely vignette from Eileen Atkins) still lives in a big house with a magnificent stained glass entrance, while Harvey's daughter gets married at the swanky Grosvenor House, and there are the usual tourist porn shots of Trafalgar Square, the Millennium footbridge, Southbank, and cutesy little clothing boutiques which amazingly are still open for business at 7pm on a Sunday.
But although it all gets a little schmaltzy at times (a tear-jerker wedding speech, an Affair to Remember-type misunderstanding), Hopkins' script adds a little bite to the proceedings.
This is much to do with Thompson who gives a sensitive and compassionate performance as the middle-aged woman we can all recognise, whose life is limited to work, the occasional humiliating blind date and coping with a smothering mother.