Rueful and Truthful, 'Harvey' Moves in Utterly Winning Ways

A pensive, wistful note of loss permeates "Last Chance Harvey," an unassuming, sneakily winning movie starring Dustin Hoffman and Emma Thompson. Sort of a "Before Sunrise" for the sunset years, this quiet romantic comedy takes a cinematic chestnut (two meet fleetingly, spend time together and embark on a tentative romance until fate intervenes) and somehow infuses it with a sense of rue and regret that makes it seem new.

Hoffman plays the title character, a New York-based jingle writer who travels to London for his daughter's wedding. It's obvious almost immediately that Harvey is close to washed-up professionally. But once he gets to London, it becomes increasingly clear that he's on the outs personally as well. He's even shot down by his own daughter, who chooses her stepfather to give her away. Admittedly, Harvey is a social flatfoot. He's having trouble accepting the fact that he's become dispensable. But when he meets Kate (Thompson), a mutual recognition of alienated souls transpires, and the two wind up spending a day walking London's lively South Bank.

"Last Chance Harvey," which was written and directed by Joel Hopkins, is far from perfect. Too often, scenes played for laughs don't deliver, and a subplot featuring Kate's elderly mother, played by the sublime Eileen Atkins, goes nowhere. But for all its false starts and slight digressions, "Last Chance Harvey" gets the emotional core of its story exactly right, from the way Kate fights back tears during a blind date in a pub to the cheerful front Harvey puts up when he arrives in London to discover that the entire wedding party is staying somewhere else.

Those moments occur with spontaneous, unforced power, and they're as unbearable as casual stabs in the heart. But once Kate and Harvey's paths manage to converge, they settle into an easy, ambling rhythm that makes even the contrivances of the plot seem utterly believable. By now we expect Thompson to imbue characters with her signature brand of wry radiance, which she does here, again. It's Hoffman, last seen two years ago in the execrable "Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium," who delivers the most surprising performance in "Last Chance Harvey." With his rumpled raincoat and dejected, shuffling walk, he reprises the nebbishy, slightly spiky loser that made audiences fall in love with him in the first place. (Just wait for Harvey's climactic moment of triumph, as full of awkwardness as it is of grace, and nothing short of magnificent.)

As gratifying as it is to watch these two pros in such a lilting duet, the pleasures of "Last Chance Harvey" lie mostly in the way it moves. This is a flaneur of a film, taking its leisurely, observant time as Harvey and Kate make their way toward a tentative friendship. With all of London as its backdrop, the whole movie plays like a quiet, delicious stroll through a city full of history and loneliness and promise. "Last Chance Harvey" may owe a debt to movies that have come before, but it winds up being something all its own. It's an exceptionally touching and deeply romantic cinematic rarity -- a movie about people who are recognizably human.

Last Chance Harvey (99 minutes, at area theaters) is rated PG-13 for brief strong profanity.