Review of Last Chance Harvey (2008) by Elin M — 16 Jun 2009

A charming, intelligent romantic comedy featuring two really excellent central performances from Dustin Hoffman and Emma Thompson, who bring two hurt yet hopeful characters to life with great subtlety and sensitivity.

The plot involves a few of the romcom genre's standard devices, but there are some variations too, notably an unusually bleak opening act. Hoffman really makes you feel his character's pain in the first half hour of the film as poor, stressed Harvey is put through a cruel series of wounding rejections in his job as a jingle writer and in his family life.

Thompson too makes her character entirely believable; her lonely statistician Kate is a convincing portrait of someone struggling to smile under the weight of accumulated compromises and humiliations.

You really want some sunshine to break through the clouds over these two flawed but likeable characters, and of course it does; but one of the strengths of Last Chance Harvey is that the darkness never seems far away.

There is a lovely scene at the very end in which Thompson movingly conveys how frightening it can sometimes be to dare to hope. The locations are very well used too; London can rarely have been made to look lovelier.

Don't leave too quickly at the end; there's a sweet little postscript involving Kate's curtain-twitching stereotype of a mother slipped in shortly after the credits have begun to roll.