'Harvey' makes the most of his chance

It's as if you've stumbled into a storefront gallery with some low-slung jazz playing quietly in the background. The images are mostly solitary ones -- a man here, a woman there. Even in crowds they seem isolated. There is stillness and a sadness in these people -- bare memories of what being with someone feels like lingering around the edges. You wish them a happy ending.

And that is the effect of "Last Chance Harvey," writer-director Joel Hopkins' meditation on loneliness and love coming at a time in life when you might think those chances have all played out. Just about everything works in this small and surprisingly hopeful film, with beautifully attenuated performances by Dustin Hoffman and Emma Thompson, who slip into the characters Hopkins has sewn for them like an old sweater.

The story nestled inside "Last Chance Harvey" is neither unfamiliar nor uncommon. Life is generally good, but the years chip away at onetime dreams; relationships fail or never quite happen; days are framed by a series of compromises big and small.

Like a lot of his late-middle-aged compatriots, Harvey -- that would be Hoffman -- has long since come to terms with the notion of falling short. In the case of career, it's writing jingles for TV commercials, his hopes of being a jazz musician long since packed away. "Were you any good?" he's asked at one point. "Not good enough," he replies.

Still, the job is something to hold onto, but Harvey finds even that in jeopardy as he heads to London for his daughter's marriage -- his having fractured and died years ago. His relationship with daughter Susan (Liane Balaban) hasn't turned out as he'd planned either. There are, simply put, any number of last chances facing Harvey as he boards the plane.

Life for Kate, played by Thompson, is waning too. In her 40s and still single -- "my situation" is how her mother (Eileen Atkins) refers to it -- she spends her days in data collection at Heathrow Airport, asking other people about what we can only guess are their far more interesting lives.

But mostly Kate's time is spent trying to cope with regrets as events conspire to loosen her increasingly tenuous hold on the notion that her life will somehow turn out differently. Kate's upper lip may be stiff, but in Thompson's good hands every blow is quietly recorded -- in the sag in her shoulders, the deep breath taken on the sly, the tears that she wills not to fall. Thompson lets us witness Kate's pain without pity, a neat trick indeed.