That was once an observation about my preferences in movies, that I enjoyed stories that seemed like they might happen to you, could happen, and were just about nothing really. And after spending the afternoon in Camarillo, CA in an art theater of very senior citizens in audience I think many felt it might happen too, because they gave a nice small gentle applause.
Even with their canes, assistants and wheelchair gear (noted to me by my companion holding up my poorly performing leg so I could hobble in) we were an older crew.
What was the movie? Hum. The story of a man, a jazz piano commercial jingle writer, coping with a pressure sounding job nightmare in a digitizing universe, going to London to see his daughter be married. His name is Harvey Shine, that is interesting because of course he is just Dustin Hoffman reprising himself as a romantic duffer, struggling with the job, with the marriage of a daughter he's lost to a divorce long ago, as she folded into her mother's remarriage. He's put up at a hotel, away from the entire family, apart, odd wheel. It carries so well those outsider feelings of this man, that has a daughter who doesn't seem to know him too well, that he later will say in a conversation in the film she always seemed a bit embarrassed by him, as he notes he had a child within something that never was quite right. Never right. It took a toll, one he obviously regrets,it hurts, but he knows another price had to be paid by his child who has almost become another man's child. Hard, impossible to verbalize. We miss in life on many things. In a series of hits and misses he then at this same time runs into Emma Thompson, oops Kate Walker I think, working for the airline, struggling with her own anxieties about her own scene of awkwardly attempting meeting someone, with nervous apprehension-anxieties over this. And as it seems to happen sometimes, he rebuffs her (ironically on his plane flight he was rebuffed by a passenger not interested in his chat) turns from her and some airline survey, only later to find himself after a horrible day running back into her at the airport as he fails to get the plane and get out of there to an essential work meeting. And finding a rapport then, a shift in the mind and heart, I think he can see her now. See her. After he's lost enough to understand when he is found. Or has found. Seeing.
It reminded me somehow of years ago when I was in my early twenties.Just a vague familiarity. A Cuban man drove me from the airport to a hotel down close to the Modern. A nice cabbie that talked and calmed a very fear-filled kid trying to figure out her life. Just a kind man. That's all. I was very nervous, unsure where I was, he was a great help, and I must have just told him I was afraid of not having too much money so I couldn't afford to pay more than thirty dollars. I was afraid of being overcharged. I know he didn't do that, my funds were so limited. I told him that. And I tipped him. I think he helped me get a room at a place I could afford. There is a point. A few days later I ran into him at Central Park at a festival. He and I just happily chatted like friends as he played some gaming thing on a day I needed to feel safer. It's a small world but this movie reminds me of how sometimes life hugs you in a very small corner. It allows you to listen to the tune played on the jazz piano. It gives you the blessing of a nice glass of rose.( I cannot figure out the accent on that e) And someone might actually wait for you to finish your class, as this new acquaintance does for Kate, or even walks with you all night or takes the risk to follow where someone leads.Or takes a hand or asks a favor.
Actually I've read the plot summarized here and at on-line movie sites ten times or more, when debating whether or not to risk my going out walking with such serious problems going on underfoot, so it isn't what I'd want to say-another synopsis. It wouldn't get it anyway. He goes to the wedding, is hurt by being replaced by the step dad told by the daughter in walking her down the aisle, meets this interesting, wary and lovely woman, loses his job, takes a risk, suffers a arrhythmia, almost misses a chance that he needs, she needs. And then there is her mom, calmly wondering if the neighbor is smoking bodies in the shed.
It's a little cozy movie about the lovely warmth of holding a hand and strolling into the life of another, because it's just righter than retreat.
I loved the littlest things. That there is some very old man in her writing class reading his sexual passages, that Harvey collapses when made to walk the kazillion flights of stairs at his hotel in London, both elevators off, that Emma Thompson wears this lovely silk lined raincoat so beautifully, that he goes to the pre wedding dinner with a white linen suit, crumpled with the tag not removed by the store, you know those inky ones, that they allow us to feel all the awkward staring discomfort, that Kate rolls up a little jacket or sweater to put under a child's head when they are belatedly seated at a child's table after the wedding at the reception. That he plays her a tune on the piano and asks her to stay, calming her discomfort knowing his own. That he gives her, and she him, the benefit of the doubt. That Kate goes to the rail with such anxiety when he tells her he's there, going to be there, why he missed her, and she sits and looks and admits to all the real fear of being hurt.
And he just absorbs that, and says he won't let her down.