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, quasi-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 sort of autumnal tale, and so the presence of a pair of two-time Academy Award winners is more or less fumbled away, in shrugging fashion. 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 that robs the character — and thus the movie as a
whole — of a chance at developing into 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, with real adult pain and regret, but he should, honestly, 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 goofy
musical montage of Kate trying on dresses inevitably arrives, you don’t forgive
it and just go with the flow of the movie, you don’t give it another chance. No, instead, you turn on Last Chance Harvey, and
actually start to hold a grudge.

Housed in a regular Amaray case with an accompanying cardboard slipcover, Last Chance Harvey comes presented in 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen, with a lively English language Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio track, and complementary English and Spanish subtitles. Supplemental features are anchored by a winning audio commentary track with Hopkins and his two respected stars; Hoffman’s thoughts are separately recorded, but generally well integrated, and overall the feature-length chat oscillates nicely between anecdotal remembrances, thematic analysis and other observations. A 17-minute making-of featurette mixes film clips, on-set footage and sit-down interview chats with the film’s actors; rounding out matters is the movie’s theatrical trailer. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C- (Movie) B (Disc)