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Last Chance Harvey Our rating: Your rating: 1 2 3 4 Your Comments: see all MPAA rating: PG-13 (for brief strong language) Genre: Comedy, Drama, Romance Theater release: December 25, 2008 by Overture Films Directed by: Joel Hopkins Runtime: 1 hour 32 minutes Cast: Dustin Hoffman (Harvey Shine), Emma Thompson (Kate Walker), Kathy Baker (Jean), Eileen Watkins (Maggie Walker), Liane Balaban (Susan) Related: Talk About It/Family Corner

If you've ever felt alone in a crowd or kind of passed over by life, you'll find a kinship with Harvey Shine (Dustin Hoffman) and Kate Walker (Emma Thompson). It's these feelings that give them a tentative kinship with each other when they first connect in an airport bar halfway through the film. It's not the typical meet-cute of a rom-com; it's more of a "meet-snarky." But before they meet, life has to kick them around a bit first …

Harvey is a divorcee in New York City who writes scores and jingles for commercials. But the industry is going digital and his creativity and composition skills are getting phased out. Before he leaves for London for his semi-estranged daughter's wedding, his boss (Richard Schiff) tells him he has one more chance to deliver the goods.

When Harvey arrives in London, he learns that the rest of the wedding party is staying in a rented house, while he's in a generic hotel … alone. And his daughter (Liane Balaban) has chosen to have her stepfather walk her down the aisle. In the midst of all this drama, Harvey is on his cell phone desperately trying to save his job back home.

Dustin Hoffman as Harvey Shine

Harvey skips the wedding reception to fly home in time for a Monday meeting. But he misses that flight, and when he calls to alert his office, he discovers all his effort has been for nothing—he's been canned. So he meanders into the airport bar to drown his desperation.

Kate is a single Londoner who works for the Office of National Statistics, a dead-end job that has her trying to survey weary—and sometimes surly—travelers at the airport. She is dogged by seemingly non-stop phone calls from her mother (Eileen Watkins), who lives alone and is convinced her next-door neighbor is a serial killer.

One day Kate reluctantly agrees to a blind date set up by one of her coworkers. But just when the pair is finally passing the awkward pleasantries stage of their evening, he runs into a group of friends, who decide to join Kate and Date. Feeling like an outsider on her own date—and in some ways, in her own life—Kate cuts out early.

She retreats to her non-descript life of boring work, endless cell phone calls from her neurotic mother, and occasional breaks in the airport bar to read a novel and sip a nice glass of chardonnay. Until a strange American man wanders in one day and awkwardly strikes up a conversation.

Harvey takes a shine to Kate (Emma Thompson)

The rest of the film shows the way these two hurting souls heal, revive, and disappoint each other—and how this interrupts their individual trajectories of boredom and desperation.

Most of the magic of Last Chance Harvey is the beautifully—and painfully—relatable way it depicts human emotion, including a few lovely scenes that capture Harvey and Kate's desperation. For example: After all he's been through to get to London, even though he knows he's walking into an awkward situation with his ex (Kathy Baker) and their daughter, Harvey struggles with the blinds in his hotel room. Though we only see him from behind in this scene, we can read and feel Harvey's frustration simply through the body language. In this small moment, the scriptwriters highlight the fact that it's not always the high drama that sets us off as much as the way life sometimes inserts an exclamation point at the end of that drama.

Of course, these small-but-powerful moments wouldn't be successful without the expert acting of Hoffman and Thompson, who both earned Golden Globe nominations for their performances here. And rightfully so. They let the small moments and the subtleties be, they deliver dialogue as if they've known the other characters for decades, they speak volumes with facial expressions and body language. They're not afraid to look frumpy and pathetic—and not the Hollywood version of frumpy and pathetic, which often is inexplicably still gorgeous. As they tromp around London in their baggy overcoats and their palpable mixture of fear and hope at the prospect of a new relationship, we're treated to something often missing in the movies: a relatably messy, mundane, maddening, and magnificent romance.

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