Liebe auf den zweiten Blick

Harvey Shine (Dustin Hoffman) is a New Yorker in London for his daughter's wedding. He writes advertising music and he's struggling. His ex-wife is long ago remarried, and his daughter is closer to her stepfather. Kate Walker (Emma Thompson) is an aging spinster working at Heathrow forced to endure blind dates. Kate and Harvey strikes up a conversation in an airport bar.

The story starts slow and really needs Harry to meet Kate. The 30 minutes at the start badly needs a good trim. The movie works best when the two veterans are together. Harvey does have a great relationship problem with his daughter. Other than that, the story is fairly thin, but it's still wonderful to see great actors work. If only they could write another 30 minutes of good dialog and have these guys weave their magic. Nevertheless, this is still a joy.

This movie is about a socially awkward American man and British woman who meet in London, get to like one another and may have a future together. The plot has been done a zillion times. I pretty much knew what was going to happen twenty minutes into the film. What saves the film from being one huge predictable snooze fest is that the author is clever enough not to fall into too many clichés so things seem possible if not probable. And there is the excellent casting of Dustin Hoffman and Emma Thompson. Their characters are quirky enough to be believable and both are very sympathetic. And there's no silly Hollywood ending with rockets bursting and doves flying into the sunset. There's a chance they might make it as a couple despite differences in age, culture and countries or they might be in for a huge disappointment and hurt--something both have known in their lives.

If you're expecting a movie that will entertain, be free of gratuitous sex scenes and violence with a charming backdrop of London landmarks, then this film is for you.

On the face of it Last Chance Harvey, helmed by the virtually unknown English director Joel Hopkins, is a mere piece of frippery, a little tale of a chance encounter in an airport between a man and woman of a certain age on the rebound from disappointment, something we've seen dozens of times. But the masterful acting of Emma Thompson and Dustin Hoffman, and the restraint of a script that could be maudlin or cutesy but never is, make the film not only entertaining and watchable but even touched by moments of grace.

Harvey Shine (Hoffman) is a composer of TV jingles who may be out of work. When he goes London to attend his daughter's wedding, he learns she has chosen her stepfather, Brian, to give her away. Amid these humiliations Harvey runs into Kate Walker (Thompson), who works doing surveys of passengers passing through Heathrow.

Thompson is playing an old maid saddled with a mother (the great Aileen Atkins) worried about her "situation" and also suspicious of a Polish neighbor she thinks may be a new Jack the Ripper. She calls all the time. Harvey keeps getting calls from his New York agent, but they're never encouraging. This cell phone shtick is unoriginal wallpaper. None of the developments is thought provoking or surprising. But the film avoids pushing too hard and thus gains credibility, at least in the personalities. Liane Balaban, as Susan, Harvey's daughter and the bride, has a credible restraint and sweetness. She is decent to Harvey, even as she has cooperated in his virtual exclusion from her marriage celebration. Kathy Baker plays Jean, Harvey's ex-wife, with poise and elegance.

At the center is Hoffman. He never plays for bathos. He woos Kate with delicate humor. His sense of defeat is only partial. This may be his "last chance" both to be a presence at his daughter's nuptials and to find a woman who will care about him, but though the screenplay puts him out on a limb, it doesn't coat him in desperation. He takes taxis everywhere, and stays at a nice hotel. He conveys an aura of quiet pluck. His little smiles are never forced; he's good humored. Beyond that, Hoffman has moments of stillness more beautiful than any actor's fussy line readings.

I guess you could call this a bittersweet comedy. Despite a scene that verges on the maudlin when Harvey speaks at the wedding reception, the film's skill is in the way it averts all disasters. The adeptness with which the two principals stay away from ever pushing too hard is the essence of good film acting. Last Chance Harvey may not make a deep impression but that slight memory it leaves behind is a good one. It will do to while away an afternoon. With Dustin and Emma, one is in good hands. _________________

Yes, it's one of those "nice" movies but Emma Thompson's presence alone raises the worthiness of this movie several notches. We believe everything we see in her wonderful complicated face and that's the hook that will carry you along, it certainly did me. Dustin Hoffman, is the unlikely romantic door that opens to Emma, poor girl. But she sees something in him that I, quite honestly, didn't. At the end of the day if it's okay with Emma, it's okay with me. There are a couple of marvelous moments but that's about it. Another element that helps us enormously to escape the predominant flatness is Eileen Atkins as Emma's mother. All in all I would recommend you to see it, preferably on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

At its best, this rather slight 2008 melding of comedy and drama reminds me of Ulu Grosbard's bittersweet "Falling in Love" (1984) in which Robert DeNiro and Meryl Streep stumble into a romantic relationship constantly derailed by guilt and commuter train schedules. At its worst, this film - leisurely directed and written by Joel Hopkins - uses several well-worn cinematic conventions - including a familiar third-act plot device from a classic movie - and forces a predictable ending that is far from satisfying. On the upside, it certainly helps to have actors the caliber of Dustin Hoffman and Emma Thompson in the principal roles, although I have to admit I was not taken in by their characters' halting romance because the actors are simply not meshing in a convincing way. In fact, this movie ironically works better when the actors perform in separate scenes away from each other. The problem is that the elfin Hoffman just tries too hard to overcome Thompson's self-protective demeanor of disappointment.

The story focuses on Harvey Shine, a divorced jingle writer whose career seems to be waning in the face of more youthful talent. At the same time, his daughter Susan is getting married in England, so he is anxious to offset his professional disappointments with a family reunion he really needs. However, their estrangement turns out to be deeper than expected since Susan tells him that she has already asked her rugged, engaging stepfather to give her away at the wedding. When he concludes that it is he who has become the family outsider, he meets Kate Walker, an airport employee who has the thankless task of surveying passengers coming off their flights. She also happens to be a lonely spinster who lives near her paranoid mother and finds the prospect of another failed blind date excruciating. Kate and Harvey meet-cute at a Heathrow lounge at their lowest emotional points, and they start to bond over long walks along London's South Bank. She convinces him to go to Susan's reception, and he agrees only if Kate becomes his date. The rest of the plot follows the story arc you would expect.

In perhaps a conscious move, Hoffman seems to be channeling a bit of Benjamin Braddock's schlubby, obsessive nature in "The Graduate" over forty years later. He is at his best when we feel Harvey's rejection in isolation, but the assertive approach the 71-year-old actor takes in courting Kate is challenging to embrace. Thompson, on the other hand, is a pure joy as Kate because she plays against the grain of what could have been a victim character. She wears Kate's disappointment in such a convincingly objective manner that her moments of heartache attain greater resonance. Eileen Atkins and Kathy Baker have just a few scenes to bring their characters to life, Kate's dotty mother and Harvey's still-resentful ex-wife, respectively. London looks pretty inviting thanks to John de Borman's crisp cinematography, though Dickon Hinchliffe's tinkling music punctuates the proceedings excessively. The 2009 DVD contains a nice audio commentary track with Hoffman (recorded separately), Hopkins and a particularly acerbic Thompson. The sixteen-minute featurette reflects the same personalities in a standard making-of format, although both this and the theatrical trailer give away too much of the plot.