Little big man
On the eve of his new film with Emma Thompson, Gabrielle Donnelly finds that what Dustin Hoffman lacks in stature he makes up for in banter
He’s a funny little man, is Dustin Hoffman. And he is, it must be said, a very little man indeed, smaller even than Tom Cruise, and not much bigger than Al Pacino, who is so very small that you want to wrap him up in a handkerchief and put him to bed on a lily pad. Which does not, of course, make any of the three men in any way unattractive. Certainly Dustin is quite happy to ham up his lack of inches on the screen, skipping (or occasionally shuffling) cheerfully alongside lofty co-stars from tall Jon Voight in Midnight Cowboy to even taller Gene Hackman in Runaway Jury, from lanky Vanessa Redgrave in Agatha to, most lately, the far from tiny Emma Thompson, whom he met making Stranger Than Fiction. She is about to loom over him again on cinema screens all over Britain, playing his love interest in the new romantic comedy Last Chance Harvey.
Hoffman caught the mood of the Sixties and made a comeback in the early Eighties. He is celebrated for wonderful performances in The Graduate, Tootsie, Little Big Man and All the President’s Men.
Comfortable as he clearly is with his lack of inches on the screen, when you meet him off it, there is a sense that he minds more than he lets on. Oh, he’ll laugh it off, joking that God punished him for boyhood misdeeds by making him a 5ft 6in actor, just as he laughs off his craggy features (“I always identified with Dumbo because he got the ears and I got the nose”). But you also can’t help noticing that, for someone who professes not to care about his physical appearance, his off-duty uniform of plain dark suits and open-necked shirts are awfully well tailored to his physique. His strong, square hands are always exquisitely manicured, and his luxuriant salt-and-pepper hair is cut and conditioned with every bit as much loving attention as a cheerleader’s.
He’s as dapper as ever when we meet on this sunny afternoon in Beverly Hills, but initially a little low on the jokes – he’s fighting a cold and feeling groggy. But he is, and has always been, a trouper to his bones. He’s come to talk to me about Last Chance Harvey, and, by golly, talk to me about Last Chance Harvey is what he will do.
“I’ve been visiting London for years,” he observes of the film’s setting. “My honeymoon with my first wife was there so that was, what, 1968 or something like that. Things have changed since then, of course. Back then, there were no hamburgers and now there’s nothing but American wrappings on the street – the global village, if you will.” He stops, remembering, even through the haze of cold medication, a joke. “By the way, someone once said, if you want to know what country America will never go to war with, it’s any country that has McDonald’s!”
He laughs, and stops again, remembering, rather endearingly, that he is supposed to be giving me a quote about England. “What I love about English people,” he says, “is the way they use the word ‘eccentric’. England is the only country I’ve gone to where, as far as the English are concerned, no one is crazy. No one. You can see someone walking down the street who is really, obviously, pathologically, certifiably insane. And you say to another English person, ‘Wow, look at that person there.’ And they will look at him and say, ‘Mmm… oh, yes, a bit… well, eccentric, really’.” He guffaws. “And that’s as far as you go! As far as you guys call it, no one is past eccentric!”
Last Chance Harvey is a sweet, slight romance about a washed-up American composer of commercial jingles and a lemon-tongued English spinster, who meet and fall in love on a meltingly lovely autumn afternoon in London. Its heart is in the right place, and it seems churlish to draw attention to a space-time continuum in which two not so young people are able to arrive at Paddington Station sometime after lunch, stroll casually all the way to the South Bank, attend a writing class, and then enjoy a lengthy tour of the Embankment, to emerge from the experience in what appears to be still the middle of the afternoon.
It seems positively mean-spirited to speculate that, in any world outside of a film script, Emma Thompson’s wry, clever Kate might just fail to be enraptured by a man several inches shorter and a quarter-century older than she, who lives on another continent, has failed as both a musician and a father, and appears to have very little else going on in his life. Let’s just say the story rattles along, that London looks glorious, and that for all the shortcomings of the script, the chemistry between the two stars is undeniable.
“Emma and I are creatively married,” Dustin declares, firmly if possibly just a little strangely. “When we first met, I said to her, ‘Look, we both play these so-called character roles, but what if we don’t do anything, what if we just be like we are when we sit down and have a few drinks together?’ So we got together and got talking, and when we did so, we both found ourselves interesting not only to each other, but to ourselves.
“We brought out a certain side of ourselves with each other, and we said, ‘Let’s make a movie and explore this.’ It’s an extraordinary feeling when we work together. I don’t think we – or, I’ll speak for myself, I – have ever done anything closer to myself than the work I do with her.” He barks a laugh. “Marriage should be that easy! Right?”
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