Last Chance Harvey

Presumably named "Lact Chance Harvey" because "Masters Acting Class with Hoffman and Thompson" wouldn't play as well on the poster.

Hoffman is a somewhat-beaten middle-aged man who gave up music for ad jingles and is on the verge of being canned. Thompson is what an earlier time would have called a spinster, tending to her clingy mother, working at a terrible airline job that requires her to try to talk to people who are brushing past her, and wasting time in writing classes. They meet because he drops everything to attend his daughter's wedding in London; the moment in which he realizes that he has been put up in a hotel while everyone else in the wedding party is staying together elsewhere tells you everything you need to know about how that's going.

The movie traces, quickly and simply, how these two people some together and help each other out. What makes the movie special is that none of their progress is traced by dramatically pointed lines, clever directing, or manufactured moments-- it's all handled by watching the two main actors behave like actual human beings.

The movie, admittedly, does not have the full courage of its convictions. At one point, we do resort to a walking-about-town music montage. And we are saddled with a completely gratuitously stupid sub-plot with Thompson's mother that was undoubtedly meant to accent quirky charm.

But the moments that arrive are so real (Hoffman's character, sitting at the children's table at his daughter's reception, interrupted step-dad James Brolin to give his own toast to the couple, and it is a moment so completely stripped of Hollywood artifice that it both squeezes and lifts your heart) and so true to the characters that you can forgive the mis-steps. It is a really sweet, funny and hopeful movie, a movie by grown-ups for grown-ups,-- if you are a grown-up, it deserves your attention.