On the verge of losing his job, rundown New Yorker jingle writer Harvey Shine (Dustin Hoffman) flies to London for a weekend to attend his daughter’s wedding, but promises to be back on Monday morning to make an important meeting. He arrives to learn his daughter has chosen her stepfather to walk her down the aisle instead of him. Devastated, Harvey leaves the wedding before the reception, misses his plane and ends up drowning his sorrows at the airport bar, where he strikes up a conversation with Kate Walker (Emma Thompson), a slightly prickly, 40-something singleton whose life is limited to work, the occasional humiliating blind date and endless phone calls from her smothering, delusional mother, Maggie (Eileen Atkins). The growing connection between the pair energizes and inspires both of them, even as they grapple with difficulties of adult-onset romance.

Not yet 40, British-born writer-director Joel Hopkins (Jump Tomorrow) perhaps doesn’t have the necessary life experience to pull off the injection of a credible depth of feeling into this tale. The resultant harmless inconsequentiality is a lumpy, sentimental mass that clumsily strikes many of the familiar surface keys of melancholic regret. But there’s a crinkle-eyed mischievousness that pokes through in Hoffman’s performance and robs the character — and thus the movie as a whole — of a chance at something darker, and more arresting. (As Harvey’s grown but still wounded and emotionally distant daughter Susan, it’s Liane Balaban who makes a lasting impression.) Hopkins doesn’t necessarily want to play on that field, but he should, since his film doesn’t have the wit to compete with Something’s Gotta Give, the movie that it most clearly wants to emulate. Ergo, when the silly montage of Kate trying on dresses inevitably arrives, you don’t forgive it and just go with the flow of the movie, you turn on the film, and hold a grudge. (Overture Films, PG-13, 99 minutes)