I confess that I have not cared for the previous directorial efforts of filmmaker Rebecca Miller but at least in the cases of those films—Angela (1995), Personal Velocity (2002), The Ballad of Jack and Rose (2005), The Private Lives of Pippa Lee (2009) and Maggie’s Plan (2015)—I could at least mostly recognize what she was going for and what she was trying to say, even if she didn’t do it in a particularly satisfactory manner. Her latest work, She Came to Me, on the other hand, is such a bizarre and ultimately unsuccessful amalgamation of inexplicable elements and tones that I genuinely have no idea as to what she was trying to accomplish here, other than to waste a bunch of excellent actors on one of the more impenetrable screenplays in recent memory.
It stars Peter Dinklage as Steven Loudden, a celebrated opera composer who is in the midst of a major case of writer’s block and a marriage to his former therapist, Patricia (Anne Hathaway), in which she has strictly regimented practically every aspect of their lives. While walking the dog one day, Steven goes into a bar and makes the acquaintance of Katrina (Marisa Tomei), a tugboat captain and a tentatively recovered romance addict. The inevitable one-night stand proves to be liberating enough to inspire a new work about a psychotic tugboat captain described by one admirer as “a female Sweeney Todd” but becomes a lot more complicated when Katrina comes back into the picture. Meanwhile, Julian (Evan Ellison), Patricia’s 18-year-old son from a previous marriage, has fallen in love with Tereza (Harlow Jane), the 16-year-old daughter of Magdalena (Joanna Kulig), who happens to be the Loudden’s cleaning woman, and when her stepfather Trey (Brian D’Arcy James), a conservative-minded court stenographer, learns that the two have been having sex, he becomes obsessed with pressing charges of statutory rape.
The result is a film that wants to tackle issues regarding race, class, gender, sexuality and immigration in a seemingly earnest manner while dealing with the subplot involving the kids while at the same time going for a more farcical approach when dealing with the romantic triangle between Steven, Patricia and Katrina. It is possible, I suppose, to pull off such a thing but it would require a filmmaker with a defter touch for either comedy or drama than Miller can muster. The rom-com elements are deeply contrived, awkwardly executed and never particularly funny—even less so when you consider that the women involved in this section are clearly suffering from psychological issues. (That said, the scene in which Hathaway’s character finally cracks while seeing another patient is perhaps the only successful scene in the film—possibly because the monologue that she delivers has been lifted virtually word-for-word from Nora Ephron’s Heartburn and therefore bears the markings of a better writer.)
The stuff involving the kids, on the other hand, is even worse because it is so achingly, cloyingly sincere in its determination to show how good and righteous these kids are and how pure their love is in the face of the mean stepfather that you want to sneer every time they come on the screen—there are John Hughes movies that have covered the gap between teens and adults with more subtlety than Miller musters here. (Apparently afraid that making the stepfather a cartoonish conservative buffoon in the hopes of making viewers overlook his undeniably legitimate concerns about the relationship, Miller has his character not only serve as a Civil War recreator but has him cheerfully serving on the Confederate side to boot.) This is bad enough but Miller is so inexplicably enamored with this plot strand that it winds up becoming the focus of the final act, going so far off the rails that it leaves you wondering if anyone came up to her at some point to suggest that it was all more laughable than amusing.
In a film in which practically every element on display borders on the inexplicable, the most mystifying aspect is that so many talented people evidently decided to sign on (including Bruce Springsteen, who contributes a new song to the end credits) despite having presumably read the screenplay beforehand. Dinklage, Hathaway, Tomei and Kulig (who you will recall from her stunning turns in Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida and Cold War) are all incredible actors but not even they and their considerable combined talents can make anything out of the gibberish they are working with here. They all try—man, do they try—but they are unable to get a single comedic or dramatic spark going and are essentially left to flounder on their own at a certain point. All of them may well make films that are indeed worse than She Came to Me (a couple already have, as anyone who saw the likes of Underdog and Bride Wars can attest) but they would have to try really hard to find another one as misbegotten as this.