Harvey Greenfield Is Running Late – Review
Most films are about a hero saving the day but with this film, Harvey Greenfield’s basically just trying to get through his. Harvey’s a man who just can’t, under any circumstances, manage to say the word “no,” he’s the ultimate in people pleasers. Luckily, watching the fallout of that turns out to be considerably funnier than it has any right to be.
Adapted from Paul Richards’ own Edinburgh Fringe one-man show, and directed by Jonnie Howard in his feature debut, Harvey Greenfield Is Running Late follows Harvey (Richards) across what becomes, through absolutely no fault of his own, the single busiest and most disastrous day of his life. He’s due to be best man at a wedding for a friend he doesn’t even particularly like. He gets roped into a funeral for a stranger because turning it down felt ruder than attending. Somewhere along the way there’s a man trying to sell him a pig, despite Harvey repeatedly explaining he is not, in fact, the person that pig is meant for. It’s chaos, entirely self-inflicted, and it’s brilliant.
Richards is the engine of the whole thing, narrating directly to camera as Harvey lurches from one crisis to the next, and he’s got a real gift for making a man who is fundamentally his own worst enemy so easy to root for. It helps that the film is stacked with recognisable British faces having a lot of fun in small roles, Annette Badland, Norman Lovett, Liz Barker and Ewen MacIntosh among them, alongside a cameo from musician Graham Parker that fans of Graham Parker & The Rumour will appreciate more than most. Everyone involved in this seems to be having a lot of fun, and that helps us do the same.
Shot entirely around Cambridge, there’s a real affection for the city running through it, and considering this was made on what was a micro budget, it looks and moves like a much bigger production than it is. The pace rarely lets up, in fact it’s pretty non stop, Harvey is essentially sprinting from disaster to disaster for most of the runtime, and while that breathless energy is exactly the point, it does mean the film asks a lot of you across ninety-odd minutes. It’s the kind of stress that’s clearly by design though, you’re meant to feel every ounce of Harvey’s spiralling day right alongside him, and when it works, and it mostly does, that’s exactly what makes it so funny. It’s worth saying too, if you’re even slightly neurodivergent, some of Harvey’s habits, the inability to disappoint anyone, the spiralling overthinking, the sheer discomfort of confrontation, might land less as broad comedy and more as uncomfortably familiar, which oddly only makes him a more sympathetic lead.
This has been doing the festival rounds for a couple of years now, picking up awards along the way, and it’s easy to see why it’s connected with audiences without ever quite finding a proper wide release, it’s the sort of small, big-hearted British comedy that tends to get overlooked simply for not having a recognisable name above the title. That’s exactly what makes its arrival on Prime Video so welcome. This is a film that deserved a wider audience the moment it started gaining festival buzz (and awards) and now, finally, it’s easy for anyone to actually go and find it.
Harvey Greenfield Is Running Late is available to rent or buy now on Amazon Prime Video.
