This really is not my type of movie. There is something about the "romantic comedy" genre which makes by stomach turn. Perhaps it is the sickly sentimentality or the weakness of the so-called comedy. Maybe it is the superficiality of it all: the lack of substance: the candy floss sweetness which melts away into nothing.
.And then last week I found myself reluctantly watching Last Chance Harvey and really enjoying it. How strange is that? Or perhaps not so strange after all. Yes, this is light fluffy stuff with not much plot. A contemporary love story. Dustin Hoffman plays Harvey, a man watching his career slip away as his family fragments. A man who finds himself drawn to a spinster (Emma Thompson) with an overbearing mother, a history of romantic disappointment and not much else in her life.
But the acting is sublime. Hoffman and Emma Thompson mesh beautifully and there is subtlety here in the way they interact and gently pull the story together. They are so believable, so comfortable in their roles that any plot weakness is irrelevant. Even the inevitable happy ending demanded by the "romcom" genre is handled lightly. There is no brashness here, no heavy handed "and they all lived happily ever after". This is a slice of disfunctional contemporary life, sanitised yes, but not unbelievably so.
Last Chance Harvey is light romantic comedy, but better than that. It defies its genre and manages to be gently uplifting without mawkish sentimentality. Perhaps though that is a measure of the acting rather than the plot... and it is the acting that makes this movie worth seeing.