Last Chance Harvey

A divorced jingle writer flies to London for his daughter's elegant wedding, and finds a soulmate in unexpected circumstances.

Last Chance Harvey is a touching story acted by two veterans, Emma Thompson and Dustin Hoffman, who bring out their characters with small gestures and deft silences. Dustin's Harvey Shine is pained and awkward at the rehearsal dinner, trying to hide the department store security tag a clerk must have forgotten to remove from his cheap suit, nervously excusing himself to take another call. He might be losing his job on Monday--he's got to take this. His daughter moves him to the far end of the table while he's away. He gives a halting and poorly-timed toast. Both his daughter and his ex-wife are embarrassed by him, and the lost years are evident on his face. He retreats to the hotel bar, slinging back Johnny Walker, neat. His ex-wife finds him and warns him not to make an ass of himself. Their entire sad history lies buried between the lines. His daughter finds him to say good-bye and lets him know the stepfather will be giving her away. More half-stated history, more residue of regret.

This isn't a movie review site. There are plenty of places on the web for that. For me the movies are a way to talk about life, to find points of connection and make discoveries. I love movies because they make you think. I love movies because they make you feel. I love movies because they lead you to remember what you used to believe in and hope for. There's a magical moment when a good movie ends, as the credits begin to roll and the song begins to play, when you consider an alternate life that ends as hopefully and charged with meaning as the film, where you feel you are discovering your best self for the first time.

Emma Thompson plays Kate Walker, a woman who has grown used to being disappointed. She has a dead-end job where people are rude to her. Her friend sets her up on a blind date and during another of the persistent calls from her mother the guy winds up inviting three of his friends to their table, two girls and a guy, all younger than she, and they're gaily chatting away while she forces an occasional polite smile. We've all felt this awkwardness, feeling like an uninvited guest at our own life, at a party but not quite part of it, looking for a moment to slip out without being noticed.

You sense life has been like this for her for a long while. Any time she's out her mother calls her every fifteen minutes, excessively worried over Kate's Old Maid status, nervous that the Pole who moved in next door may be a serial killer. (He's carrying something all wrapped up in a sheet into his storage shed, and has a smoky fire going on all day. He waves to her through her parted curtains, and she jerks her face away from the window with a start.)

It's the movies, so you know the two of them are getting together, but the charm is in the way it happens, particularly the understated and genuine way Hoffman and Thompson let their characters live the story. Slowly they agree to hope. She agrees to be his date for the reception. He buys her a nice dress, and woos her with his self-deprecating humor. Just as her fears bubble to the surface and she slips out to the exit he slips into a side room and finds a waiting piano, calls her back from the elevator with a tender song, one he wrote himself. He always wanted to a jazz pianist but was never good enough. She takes a writing class twice a week and dreams of a rustic villa with a sunny balcony, by the ocean in the south of Spain. An old man in her class writes turgid, twisted prose, a psychological thriller with an alarming preoccupation with sex. It's amazing what you can find out about two total strangers and the people around them in ninety minutes of a good story. It's amazing what we have never discovered about ourselves.

Weddings are a great setting in a movie because they are crossroad moments in real life, times when all our family stuff and unresolved internal stuff collides and converges. We put our best face forward. We conceal our failings in a new suit of clothes and in a rush, forget one of the tags. Stephanie got married in Montana and I drove all night to get there. I didn't decide to go until the last minute and Marie and I had a painful fight over it that resonates in our marriage to this day. Nothing in life or the movies prepares you for the awful, ugly moments when you run smack dab into your own inadequacies and fears, when your hurts and the hurts of those you have hurt collide like two speeding trains. There is messiness and mayhem in our real world that no movie can contain. The sentimental part of us wants it to be more like a movie, and smiles wistfully at the realization it can't be.