Last Chance Harvey (2008) raises a fundamental question about watching films: Is a movie only excellent if it has substance and fine execution, or can you call it excellent if there is nothing new but it is executed extremely well? Your answer to this will determine in large part what you think of Last Chance Harvey. Which brings me to Turkish cooking. In North America we take our Chinese restaurants and Mexican take-outs for granted, and in Australia, where non-white immigration is newer, the population says the number one benefit of increased immigration is the increased diversity of restaurants. So I was in for a shock when I asked a dozen people in Ankara, Turkey, to come over for supper and said I’d could East Indian food. There was a bit of a pause and one of the young guys said very seriously, “What’s wrong? Don’t you like Turkish food?” That was my glimpse into a culture that believed in cooking the same dishes over and over and over until you reached what you considered perfection—and, having reached perfection, no sensible person would want to change.
Last Chance Harvey is a plain old romance. The characters may be 40-something and 60-something, but it’s still boy meets girl, and you already know the ending. What writer and director Joel Hopkins tries to do is get it perfect. If you’re after new material, an edgy story, something going against the grain, you’ll be so put off by the age-old story you will not see Hopkins trying to polish a rough cut diamond.
But if you grant Hopkins the conventional arc of a love story, you can appreciate how well he tells the story. First he gets Emma Thompson on board and writes the role of Kate for her—frumpy middle-aged spinster gathering interview statistics at Heathrow Airport. Then after seeing Emma and Dustin Hoffman in Stranger than Fiction, he writes the other part for Dustin and gets him on board playing a jingle-writer at the end of his decaying career. A lot of the dialogue is pitch perfect. One way to test it is to imagine as a scene starts what those characters would say, and then see if what they say is consistent with their personalities. For example, when Harvey and Kate meet in the obligatory boy-meets-girl scene, he is at first a bit obnoxious and then quite charming, and she is at first stand-offish and then kind—perfectly in line with the characters as we know them. Another way to test the dialogue is to imagine at the start of a scene what you would write. For example, when Harvey interrupts his daughter’s wedding to make a speech, what will he say? What will the step-father who is supposed to be giving the toast do? Then watch the scene and ask whether you would change a word? A gesture?
But pitch perfect scenes do not a perfect movie make. Hopkins has said that rather than trying to avoid clichés, he “embraced a few clichés” such as the scene where Kate tries on dresses. But here the scene is ridiculous because the dresses are ridiculous, it is not the kind of shop she’d ever chose, she is not the kind to be a fashion horse, and the two characters are supposed to be in a hurry to get to a wedding reception. Similarly, the film uses the traditional fade away to schmaltzy music while we see a montage of the couple walking past some scenic sites. Although this keeps the old-fashioned tone that Hopkins wants, it temporarily puts the audience at a distance from the vary characters they’ve just become interested in.
Hopkins has also said that he tried constantly to maintain the balance between whimsy and pathos. A lot of the comic element comes from Kate’s neurotic mother who spies out her window on the Polish neighbour who she suspects is murdering people when he is, in fact, smoking sausages. Some people will object to this as irrelevant. For me, however, it worked because it reinforced the kind of life Kate lived. When Kate’s mother called yet again on Kate’s cell phone when Kate was out on a double-date, Kate’s friend fired off a great line about her mother being a human contraceptive device.
Another objection to the movie will be the age difference between the two characters. The wrong argument is that Thompson is 49 (?) and Hoffman is 71, and this just shows how sexist Hollywood and our society is. The right argument is that Kate is maybe in her late-40s and quite matronly and frumpy—except for her footwear. (The “matronly” comment is not me wanting Thompson to look like a 20-year old starlet. Quite the contrary. Just as critics compliment actors for bulking up for fighting parts or getting ugly for nasty parts, Thompson is perfectly built for a middle-aged statistics collector who dreams of writing a beach novel.) Harvey is 60-something, I’d say early sixties. He’s got a lot of energy but has lived a pretty stressful life. So now that we are talking about the characters rather than the actors, does it make sense for them to start a relationship—more specifically does it make sense for her? That’s a tough one. And I guess the bottom line is that in a classic romance we should not have doubts in our minds. Yet when we analyze it, the relationship makes sense for her. While physically he is a bit beaten up, look what he will do for her socially. On the one hand, she could go back to reading novels, collecting statistics, and answering her mother’s neurotic calls, but on the other hand, she could get some fun out of life. Furthermore, she has seen Harvey suffer a string of humiliations and come out with pride and joie de vie—the kind of guy she’s like to spend time with.