Dustin and Emma cheer up Harvey and Kate in "Last Chance Harvey"

Harvey and Kate are very, very sad. He's an American visiting London for his daughter's wedding, and he's dazed, out of place (he and the mother of the bride split awkwardly, long ago), worried about his job back home, and crushed when his daughter tells him that her stepfather will walk her down the aisle. At the rehearsal dinner, he's wearing the wrong suit and keeps saying the wrong things; he's a nice man but an old-school guy who seems to have been left behind by a faster-moving world.

She's an Englishwoman whose job consists of buttonholing surly passengers arriving at Heathrow and trying to get them to answer questions, which she tries to execute with warmth. Her cellphone rings constantly, but it's always her mother. Kate rarely has a date, and when she does, the bloke immediately gets more interested in somebody younger. On just such a date, she sits in the ladies' room at the pub, trying very hard not to cry. When Kate and Harvey finally meet, he's on his way toward getting drunk and she's determined to ignore him. Because this is a movie, they fall in love.

If they were played by run-of-the-mill actors, Harvey and Kate might just seem like a couple of sad sacks, and "Last Chance Harvey" a pointless hour-and-a-half. But they're played by Dustin Hoffman and Emma Thompson, two charismatic presences who know how to find grace and humor in disappointment, and so Joel Hopkins' movie works, far better than it deserves to. It's wildly uneven: The great Eileen Atkins is wasted as Kate's dotty mum, and Hopkins has to resort to a pointless plot device in order to stretch the movie out to 92 minutes (it's really done at around 70).

And yet, Hoffman and Thompson make "Last Chance Harvey" a small-scale pleasure. A pair of gifted comedians playing it (mostly) straight, they find a genuine chemistry together, made all the funnier for the way Kate's voice, seemingly unconsciously, becomes veddy veddy extra-British and formal when Harvey, still a stranger, is bothering her. In their sensible raincoats (though Kate acquires an adorable toddle when she dons high heels), they walk around London and get to know each other; connecting in that way of people who are meant to be together.

Hoffman, a shamelessly impish scene-stealer, effortlessly draws us to Harvey and makes us root for him; he's still doing that slightly drawling deadpan that we first saw in "The Graduate," and it's still working. But the movie belongs to Thompson, who radiates an irresistible, fluttery sanity, and who can make a crying jag both heartbreaking and funny. "I think I'm more comfortable being disappointed," sniffs Kate, who knows herself all too well. "Last Chance Harvey" is nothing ambitious, just a quiet character study — but, thanks to these actors, it works.

Moira Macdonald: 206-464-2725

or mmacdonald@seattletimes.com