She Came to Me Review: Rebecca Miller’s Operatic Rom-Com Is More Clunky Than Grand

The 21st century finds the rom-com in pretty dire straits, with even the occasional relatively successful attempt to revitalize the genre hardly leading to waves of new iterations. And in the era of arch comedy-action films, it sometimes seems like the most we can hope for are ungainly hybrids like Jason Moore’s Shotgun Wedding. Perhaps, though, cheap attempts at glomming onto the tent-pole aesthetic are preferable to the strained farce of writer-director Rebecca Miller’s She Came to Me. This is a rom-com at great pains to be both wacky and satirical but lacking the irreverence to be one and the bite to be the other.

Peter Dinklage plays Steven Loudden, a successful opera composer suffering from writer’s block who stumbles into a one-afternoon-stand with Katrina (Marisa Tomei). Katrina has the unlikely vocation of tugboat operator, and the even more eccentric personal quirk of being a barely recovered romance addict. Despite being forewarned of her penchant for stalking, Steven succumbs to her advances, and the petrified look on his face in this moment represents one of the few moments in which She Came to Me’s cultivation of cringe humor is successful.

The encounter with Katrina gives Steven the inspiration that he needs for his next piece, and thus the titular opera She Came to Me is born, a “female Sweeney Todd,” as one of Steven’s benefactors describes it. The problem with Steven’s story about a man seduced by a psychotic tugboat operator, of course, is that it’s based on a real encounter—one that his wife, Patricia (Anne Hathaway), would be none too happy about. Patricia, who’s also Steven’s former therapist, is a clean freak who strictly regiments everything down to her and Steven’s sex lives, and one gets the sense that any kind of disruption to her systems will explode into chaos.

Miller, though, manages to build little tension, comic or otherwise, around Steven’s secret, helping to render Patricia’s inevitable psychotic break as a confusing dud of a punchline. Notwithstanding a certain penchant for the uncanny—Steven’s accidental plunge off a pier leads to a kind of existential vision-quest moment—She Came to Me’s humor proves rather unadventurous. Its take on the pretensions of the theater world also lacks punch, or even the sense of farcical acceleration that it’s aiming for. This is particularly the case in a scene where Steven repeatedly corrects the actress playing the murderous tugboat operator in his opera, which seems to swirl around the same joke as if it were caught in an eddie.

The sense that the story’s stuck in idle is only exacerbated by the intercession of the B plot, a teenage romance missing even the glimmer of life provided by the performers in the main arc. Here, She Came to Me blares its abundant but rather bland social conscience: When white 16-year-old Tereza’s (Harlow Jane) conservative stepfather, Trey (Brian D’Arcy James), discovers that she’s been having sex with her 18-year-old mixed-raced boyfriend, Julian (Evan Ellison), he decides to press charges of statutory rape. The crucial wrinkle: Patricia is Julian’s mother, and Tereza’s immigrant mother, Magdalena (Joanna Kulig), is the Louddens’ cleaning woman.

When dealing explicitly with issues of class, race, immigration, and gender, Miller’s screenplay throws comedy out the window in favor of a sincerity that borders on patronizing. At one point, Tereza tearfully and helpfully summarizes the stakes of the plot to her mother when she says, “Julian will have to spend his whole life telling everyone where he lives he’s a child molester!” In the end, the earnest, righteous goodness of Tereza and Julian actually makes them harder to root for: Turns out that sexually enlightened teens who are also goody-goody environmental activist-careerists are perhaps even more obnoxious than Trey is repugnant.

The film could stand to either turn the absurdity of its social types up or way down. Trey, for all the attention paid to his outsized pride in his Civil War re-enactments and skills as a stenographer, is merely a liberal image of a bad conservative dad who isn’t even detailed (or funny) enough to count as caricature. And Patricia, given all the earnestness floating around elsewhere, is a crude stereotype of a mentally ill person. In what could be but isn’t styled as an appropriately Ophelic turn, her mental break literally sends her to a nunnery.

Perhaps the root issue is simply that She Came to Me clearly aims for the outré but always circles back around to conventional and comforting morals: love that triumphs over ignorance and ends in marriage. In other words, though parts of Miller’s film verge on the surreal, its fatal flaw is that it genuinely believes in the discreet charm of the bourgeoisie.