She Came to Me

She Came to Me

VERDICT: Opening the Berlin film festival, Rebecca Miller's quirky New York rom-com creaks and stumbles in places, but is saved by its fine cast and off-beat charm.

A safely middlebrow choice of opening film for the Berlinale’s first fully post-Covid edition since 2020, She Came to Me is an old-fashioned rom-com at heart. Mapping the intersecting love lives of a group of neurotics, eccentrics and New York City bohemians, writer-director Rebecca Miller’s seventh feature feels creaky and over-familiar in places, but a fine ensemble cast and endearingly goofy plot deliver just enough crowd-pleasing charm to keep it afloat. Reportedly still looking for North American sales deals in Berlin, it may prove too quirky and personal for big studio players, but smaller outlets and streaming services should take an interest. Miller’s track record to date has generally seen more critical than commercial success, most notably with Maggie’s Plan (2015).

She Came to Me took years in gestation, with different cast iterations attached along the way, partly due to pandemic delays. Indeed, some of the characters already appeared in Miller’s Total: Stories anthology, published last year. Peter Dinklage plays Steven Lauddem, a much-feted New York opera composer married to his former therapist Patricia (Anne Hathaway), a pathological neat freak who harbours secret ambitions to become a nun. Suffering paralysing creative block following a nervous breakdown, Steven finds unlikely inspiration in the form of Katrina (Marisa Tomei), an itinerant tug boat captain with an addiction to romance that once landed her in jail. A one-off sexual encounter with Katrina proves liberating for Steven as raw material for his triumphant new opera, but then she begins stalking him, threatening his already strained marriage and her already fragile sanity.

Meanwhile, the younger characters are facing their own emotional challenges. Patricia’s 18-year-old son Julian (Evan Ellison), born when she was still a student and now of college age himself, is deeply in love with 16-year-old Tereza (Harlow Jane), whose Polish immigrant mother Magdalena (Joanna Kulig) happens to clean house for Steven and Patricia. But the youngsters have kept their relationship discreet, mainly because Julian is mixed-heritage and Tereza fears a racist reaction from her stepfather Trey (Brian D’Arcy James), a pompous court stenographer with a weekend passion for re-enacting Civil War battles. Sure enough, when Trey learns of their romance, he does his best to destroy it, threatening Julian with statutory rape charges.

Quirky, sunny and eager to please, She Came to Me coasts along quite effectively in laidback light-operetta mode for its first hour. The jokes could do with more zing, and the relaxed pacing more swing, but Miller gets good value from a generally excellent cast. Dinklage brings convincing anguish and depth to a rare romantic lead role, his dwarfism refreshingly incidental to the plot and never even mentioned. Meanwhile Hathaway scores most of the big laughs with a lively performance driven by perky screwball energy, and the ever-reliable Tomei does her best to squeeze real emotion from her Maritime Pixie Dream Girl role. She might as well face it, she’s addicted to love. Kulig (Ida, Cold War) is a welcome presence too, lending this fluffy story an edge of flinty European art-house authenticity.

Alas, Miller’s goofy live-action cartoon stumbles in its final act as it tries to shift into nerve-jangling thriller mode, when the young lovers concoct a cumbersome escape plan to thwart Trey’s evil intentions. But Trey is such an ineffectual villain, so obviously outnumbered by sympathetic characters, that this final showdown lacks any real jeopardy or urgency. The only baffling question is why Magdalena married such an oafish bigot in the first place.

The teenage lovers in She Came to Me also seem implausibly sweet and wise, with their carefully sanitised sex lives, drearily sensible long-term relationship goals and planet-saving career ambitions. They speak in the sort of jarringly earnest, irony-free lines that John Hughes might have written for The Breakfast Club: “I’m scared we’ll grow up and forget the people we are now.” Yikes. As if that’s a bad thing. Has Miller forgotten how horny, moody and emotionally confused adolescents can be? That’s practically the dictionary definition.

She Came to Me is drenched in music, not all of it essential. Scenes from two of Steven’s contemporary operas are well-staged in colourful set-piece sequences, their presentation bordering on spiky satire but softened by Miller’s essentially humane, kindly attitude to her characters. Sandwiched between bursts of Bizet and Puccini is a twinkly, piano-heavy score by Bryce Dessner of The National, which favours sweetness over subtlety. Impressively, Bruce Springsteen also composed a new song for the soundtrack, Addicted to Romance, which plays over the end credits. Less impressively, this hoary heart-tugger falls far short of classic Bruce-penned movie tracks like Streets of Philadelphia or The Wrestler. Like everything in Miller’s affable comedy drama, it settles for being just good enough.

Director, screenwriter: Rebecca Miller
Cast: Peter Dinklage, Marisa Tomei, Anne Hathaway, Joanna Kulig, Brian d’Arcy James, Harlow Jane, Evan Ellison
Cinematography: Sam Levy
Editing: Sabine Hoffman
Music: Bryce Dessner
Producers: Damon Cardasis, Pamela Koffler, Christine Vachon, Rebecca Miller, Len Blavatnik, Anne Hathaway, Cindy Tolan, Ged Dickersin
Production companies: Round Films (US), Killer Films (US)
World Sales: Protagonist Pictures
Venue: Berlin International Film Festival (Special Gala)
In English
102 minutes