Vertical. 2023. Comedy/Drama. 102 min.
Grade: 2 out of 4
For those who never thought they’d live to see a film about a Brooklyn opera composer who convinces a tugboat captain to help a teenage boy escape statutory rape charges brought by a Civil War reenactor, then today’s your lucky day. She Came to Me, the long-overdue return of writer director Rebecca Miller, is about all these things. And less. A vaguely credible assemblage of romantic comedy quirks smothered in serious themes of self-acceptance and overcoming mental illness, the movie never comes together despite its often easygoing feel. The central trio of Peter Dinklage, Anne Hathaway, and Marisa Tomei are all saddled with characters who seem to be occupying different universes but, unsurprisingly given their respective talents, they all soldier through and acquit themselves well. Blame here to goes to the otherwise terrific Miller whose attempt to tell a relatable story about finding your true path and the wayward desires of the heart is a slow motion car crash of characters and story threads.
Miller, the daughter of playwright Arthur Miller and wife of Daniel Day-Lewis, has not directed a narrative film since 2015’s Maggie’s Plan so you’ll excuse us if we—probably unfairly—conjecture that there may be some parallels between her own cinematic dry spell and that of Steve (Dinklage) a composer of operas with a five-year-long case of writer’s block who unsuccessfully hides his depression under a mop of hair and a long, unkempt beard. Dinklage plays Steve’s existential melancholy with sadness in his eyes and slyness in his grin yet he thankfully never overplays the wild twists of fate his character has been saddled with. The only thing seemingly keeping Steve sane is his doting wife, Patricia (Hathaway), a crisply attired psychotherapist and obsessive clean freak who practically throws her glum husband out of the house with the prophetic advice to “interact with a stranger.”
That stranger turns out to be cinema’s very first sexually insatiable tugboat captain. Katrina (Marisa Tomei) is a self-described “romance addict” who wears black lingerie under her baggy denim overalls. Soon after Steve walks into the bar where she’s enjoying an 11am pick me up, she has his pants down in her tugboat, which, come to think of it, is a great code word for a place to have sex. His tryst with Katrina cures his writer’s block but, typical for someone who was once arrested for stalking, Katrina drops permanent anchor in Brooklyn with hopes of being his muse. I guess it’s a kind of bravery for a movie to feature a creatively blocked composer, an OCD-afflicted psychotherapist, and a sexually obsessive tugboat captain. But oddly enough, none of this is particularly funny and, odder still, it isn’t really meant to be. Miller, despite choosing three of the least relatable professions for her main characters, wants us to revel in the joy of their reinvention, the admitting of their mistakes, and the notion that if these three flawed souls can find happiness, anyone can. If Miller’s script was more sparkling and less proud of its eccentricities, that might have been possible. It also would have been possible had Miller just concentrated on the primary trio, especially given the dramatic possibilities inherent in Patricia discovering that Steve slept with Katrina. But Miller’s overstuffed story is only getting started.
Steve’s stepson is Patricia’s 18-year-old son Justin (Evan A. Ellison) who is ready to find his own personal tugboat for him and his 16-year-old sweetheart Tereza (Harlow Jane). Tereza is the daughter of Patricia’s Polish housekeeper Magdalena (Joanna Kulig from 2018’s devastating drama Cold War). Magdalena is married to Trey (Brian d’Arcy James) a court stenographer and Civil War hobbyist who demands such obedience for having legally adopted Tereza that he wants Justin locked up for sleeping with her without his knowledge. To Miller’s credit there is no doubt that she respects all 500 of these characters and she provides all of them with a moment to jump off this slow-moving merry-go-round and attempt to connect with us as real people. Most of time, though, Miller feels stuck between making the farce the movie seems to want to be and making a Noah Baumbach-esque story of upper middle-class urban malaise. She doesn’t disrespect the notion that all three of her main characters are varying degrees of mentally ill but her solutions, namely love and religion, are facile and not quite believable. And seeing Patricia complete her journey by improbably wearing in a nun’s outfit is flippant and unfunny and indicative of the scattershot nature of the whole affair.
With its surfeit of characters and storylines, She Came to Me lays a lot of pipe in the service of very little humor or insight. It’s a disappointing comedown from the writer/director of Maggie’s Plan and 2002’s Personal Velocity, films that combine laughs, romance, and drama and presents them from an authentic and distinctive female point of view. She Came to Me plays as if Miller needed to one-up those two achievements by doubling down on what made them so winning. Instead she wound up with a choppy and bedraggled mess of a film; although if you want to see Oscar winner Anne Hathaway strip naked while yelling about kreplach, you know where to go.