Entertainment | Film & Cinema
An ode to a gracious turn
Last Chance Harvey is a wonderful tribute to love found late in life
- Reuters
- Published: 23:04 July 10, 2009
At 71, Dustin Hoffman says he will never retire from acting but he may have to look beyond the Hollywood that made him famous to find the roles he relishes as he ages.
His latest film, Last Chance Harvey, is a small ode to finding love late in life, a theme that should resound with the fastest-growing movie-going audience — viewers over 40.
Respecting age
Hoffman says he never understood the obsession with youth and what he calls “the lack of respect for age here that doesn't exist in all countries''.
Last Chance Harvey, written and directed by British filmmaker Joel Hopkins, was tailor-made for Hoffman and Emma Thompson, friends since they made Stranger Than Fiction a few years ago. Hoffman made sure that Harvey, like himself, was a frustrated jazz pianist.
Unlikely match
Divorced, lonely and about to lose his job as a past-his-prime jingle composer, Harvey heads to London for his daughter's wedding.
As he obsesses about getting back to New York to save his job, Harvey careens towards failure as a father until he meets the sensitive and hopelessly single Kate (Thompson).
Kate, a middle-aged woman held back by a needy mother and a go-nowhere job, dreams of becoming a writer.
A most unlikely pair, Harvey and Kate roam the streets of a romantic London and mull over life and dreams.
A turning point comes when Harvey, at Kate's urging, rushes back to his daughter's wedding and makes a speech that could have gone terribly wrong but, instead, redeems him.
Personal touch
Hoffman wrote the speech with his wife of some 30 years the night before filming, dredging up emotions from his own divorce from his first wife when he was making Kramer vs Kramer — a portrait of divorce for which he won his first Academy Award.
“I do my best work when it is, in a sense, autobiographical,'' Hoffman said. “With Tootsie, I became a better man by having been a woman. In Kramer, he was a bad father and had to become a good father.''
As he enters his seventh decade, Hoffman says he has never felt better than he does right now.
“That's because I am closer to understanding that your life can be yours and you don't have to feel bad about it,'' the actor said.
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