She Came To Me: An Ostentatiously Odd Sort-Of Comedy
By Liam Lacey
Rating: C
She Came to Me, the latest film exploration of creatively unconventional relationships from writer-director Rebecca Miller (Personal Velocity, Maggie’s Plan) is set in the world of contemporary opera. It has a plot that might be at home in a comic operetta, if one could imagine a comic opera about mental health disorders.
The film is, in a word, ostentatiously odd. Whether one finds it insightfully askew or laboriously quirky will be a matter of taste.
Peter Dinklage plays an artistically blocked composer in She Came to Me
In the film, Peter Dinklage plays a composer, Stephen, who is suffering from a creative block. He is unable to finish the score for what is supposed to be his comeback opera, after a major depression five years before. That depression led him to a therapist, Pat (Anne Hathaway) who he subsequently married and who he addresses as “Doc.”
Doc, aka Patricia, has her own mental health issues. She’s a cleaning freak, and she keeps their Manhattan townhouse in pristine condition, thanks in part, to her Polish-American maid, Magdalena (Joanna Kulig).
She feeds Stephen his meds and manages his life in every detail. When he asks if they might have sex on a Thursday, not their regular night, she considers it briefly before answering, “That’s an interesting idea.”
Pat was previously married and has an 18-year-old son, Julian (Evan Ellison) who is, unbeknownst to his parents, involved with Magdalena’s 16-year-old daughter, his science-nerd soul mate Tereza (Harlow Jane). Unfortunately, Tereza’s dad (Brian d'Arcy James) is a terrible person, a court reporter, whose job gives him an over-sized sense of law and retribution.
Patricia, the therapist-wife, suggests he needs to take a walk and meet real people to find inspiration. One morning, he takes her advice, heading out with his French bulldog, Levi, who he ties up outside a bar and goes inside for an 11 a.m. eyeopener.
There, he meets a tugboat captain, Katrina (Marisa Tomei), who’s drinking away her day off. They fall into conversation, and she invites him to visit her boat. She talks about her recent health crisis, addictions to love and sex, then strips off her tugboat gear to reveal a black bustier and proceeds to seduce him. She is also, as he subsequently discovers, not an easily rebuffed lover.
Rattled but definitely inspired, Stephen discovers his creative flow again, and produces a hit opera about a cannibalistic woman tugboat captain who seduces and kills men (a “Sweeney Todd in reverse” enthuses one fan). One might imagine the revelation of this affair would devastate the devoted Patricia. But after a quick nervous breakdown in which she strips off her clothes and screams at a patient, she fixes on her true deep desire, to become a Catholic nun.
The film gathers some interest in the third act when Stephen and the tugboat captain Katrina join forces to help the young lovers, Julian and Tereza, escape from the girl’s angry father, who wants to put his daughter in lockdown and bring statutory rape charges against the boy.
In case you have any doubt about the father’s villainy, his hobby is playing the Rebel side in Civil War reenactments.
With a A-list cast, She Came To Me at least holds your attention, like an early Woody Allen portrait of New York neurotics, though lacking Allen’s pomposity-deflating punchlines. Without a firm anchor on their shifting, uncertain characters, the actors perform: Dinklage furrows his brow and broods, Hathaway widens her eyes and preens, and Tomei, who comes off the best, exudes a loose-bodied feral energy. Collectively though, their interactions have a theatrical brittleness which never feels spontaneous or perhaps as funny as they’re intended to be.
One of the most ambitious and impressive aspects of She Came to Me is the music, including two operatic fragments that are included in the film (along with the burbling orchestral score written by Bryce Dessner). It raises the interesting idea of what the project might be if it were an actual comic operetta, where the music and visual elements could be primary and the improbability of the performances and plot would be less of a distraction.
She Came to Me. Directed and written by Rebecca Miller. Stars Peter Dinklage, Marisa Tomei, Joanna Kulig, Brian d’Arcy James, Anne Hathaway and Harlow Jane. She Came to Me opens in theatres across Canada on Friday, Oct. 6.