Abnormal behavior is de rigueur throughout Rebecca Miller’s filmography, with her characters acting absolutely absurdly from The Ballad of Jack and Rose to Maggie’s Plan. She Came to Me is no exception, with ridiculous choices made by everyone on- and off- screen. And yet, while She Came to Me isn’t among Miller’s best work, this sometimes dramatic comedy isn’t without its charms. Her characters aren’t weird merely for the sake of indie quirkiness, and She Came to Me is no exception. Instead, their irrational behavior is motivated by love — romantic and otherwise — which serves as inspiration for each of them.
Opera composer Steven Lauddem (Peter Dinklage) is stuck. The deadline for his newest opera looms just two weeks away, but he’s nowhere near finished with it. His wife, Patricia (Anne Hathaway), is supportive and understanding, though as a therapist — formerly his therapist — it’s part of the territory. In a chance meeting in Brooklyn, Steven encounters Katrina (Marisa Tomei), a tugboat captain and recovering romance addict. She takes him back to where her boat is anchored in nearby Red Hook and seduces the very willing Steven. He finds inspiration in their coupling and quickly composes an opera about a tugboat captain/siren, rediscovering success and critical acclaim with a work loosely based on their encounter.
Meanwhile, Patricia’s teenage son, Julian (Evan Ellison), has fallen for his grade-skipping classmate Tereza (Harlow Jane), whose mom, Magdalena (Joanna Kulig), and stepdad, Trey (Brian d’Arcy James), aren’t initially aware of their relationship. At first, these two plots don’t seem related, but then Miller’s script throws a curveball to connect them and show exactly how far people will go for love.
That twist upsets the tonal balance of She Came to Me, turning an enjoyably off-kilter comedy about the various impacts of an affair briefly into something more serious. Yet Miller never fully deals with the implications of what she sets up in the film’s second half about young Julian, who is a person of color, resulting in an absolutely bewildering experience. She Came to Me doesn’t really acknowledge the role that race could play in Julian’s subplot, which is wild in 2023. It will be impossible for most of the audience not to think about it.
Miller’s New York here and in Maggie’s Plan is not unlike Woody Allen’s version of the city, where every resident is seemingly defined by their neuroses — and almost everyone is white. There’s not much personality of the real New York present in this film, though these characters have enough eccentricities to compensate. Brian d’Arcy James’ Trey is a full-time court reporter and part-time Civil War reenactor equally obsessed with the legal system and historical accuracy. Tomei’s Katrina is full of surprises, from her addiction to love and sex to her cozy berth that looks like its owner went wild at Anthropologie, rather than what we expect of a tugboat captain’s cabin. Hathaway’s Patricia lives a regimented life governed by a love of cleaning and relegating sex to certain days of the week, so is it any surprise when she becomes enamored with the idea of becoming a nun?
Though ostensibly set in the real world, Miller’s films aren’t intended to be a reflection of reality, but She Came to Me’s insistence on ignoring what’s actually going on in the present takes the viewer out of the largely whimsical world she has created. It mars the experience despite the efforts of all of these great actors. Tomei and Hathway have won Oscars, for god’s sake, and I’ll never stop being mad that Dinklage has never even been nominated, despite amazing performances in everything from The Station Agent to Cyrano. They’re all doing yeoman’s work here, but it can’t buoy the film.
Even with the addition of the subplot, She Came to Me only clocks in at around 100 minutes, a milestone it strains to reach. This could be a pleasantly slight film if it had chosen to focus purely on the love triangle between the composer, the therapist, and the tugboat captain on the streets of New York, but it tries — and fails — in its pursuit of something more.
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“She Came to Me” is in theaters Friday.
