Dustin Hoffman is the reason to see Last Chance Harvey. It’s a cute movie, but it’s also a mess of overused clichés and manufactured complications — saved from failure by its lead’s spot-on performance.

Hoffman plays Harvey Shine, who once aspired to be a pianist but is now a jingle writer on the verge of losing his job. Long divorced, he flies to London for his daughter’s wedding, where she tells him she’d rather have her stepfather (James Brolin) give her away.

She tells him that at the rehearsal dinner. Writer/director Joel Hopkins thankfully trusts Hoffman enough to give him a close-up reaction shot, upwards of five seconds, with no dialogue. It’s devastating. He’s devastated. Then he pulls himself together and hugs his daughter goodnight.

That kind of patient, observant filmmaking is lacking in too many instances of Last Chance Harvey, which, just when you’re getting invested, pulls something out of the trash heap of romantic comedy cliches and expects you to lap it up. It even includes one of those horrific “try on lots of ugly dresses in the dressing room” montages, which is so tonally jarring, such an obvious mistake, that I almost want to believe it was just a series of outtakes that made it into the film accidentally.

The thing is, Last Chance Harvey isn’t a romantic comedy, it’s a romantic drama. After the wedding, Harvey retreats into a bar, where he meets Kate Walker (Emma Thompson), whom the movie has been following concurrently. Kate’s a single woman who fears she’s too far past the “single woman” age range, who has a close relationship with her mother and is liked by her friends but is too guarded, or perhaps timid, to meet somebody.

Harvey strikes up a conversation. She resists. He keeps talking, and she slowly warms up to him. That pattern repeats so much that you start wondering why she keeps resisting him. Eventually, she begins to wonder that herself.

That’s all good stuff and what makes the movie worth it — Harvey and Kate are both really nice people and develop a really nice relationship with each other. When they eventually go to the wedding reception (after the terrifying trying-on-dresses scene), Hopkins also knows just what notes to hit, with Harvey finding an unexpected measure of understanding with his daughter.

The relationship between Kate and him could’ve also ended simply and sweetly. Instead, Hopkins decides to dig out the tired formulas again and present us with a really unnecessary complication involving a near-miss and eventual reunion, blah blah.

The really annoying thing is that this seems to only exist in order to stretch the