Berlin Review: Rebecca Miller’s ‘She Came To Me’ With Anne Hathaway, Peter Dinklage & Marisa Tomei
You would need a heart of stone to leave Rebecca Miller’s She Came to Me without wanting to pick up sticks and live on a tugboat, preferably one steered by Marisa Tomei.
Tomei’s tugboat captain Katrina, with her softly weathered face, earthy humor and somewhat sociopathic “love” addiction, is a simply fabulous rom-com heroine, if She Came to Me can be described as a rom-com. And in Peter Dinklage, at his most darkly glowering as the perpetually panic-stricken, creatively blocked composer Katrina targets with her romantic zeal, she has her perfect foil. Props to Berlin Film Festival artistic director Carlo Chatrian for nailing She Came to Me: light but pungent, it is a perfect opening-night film.
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Not that this is a two-horse show: In the screwball tradition, there is much more going on here than a middle-aged meet-cute. At the outset, Miller swings between the rarefied opulence of an opera house foyer – where Dinklage’s Stephen is hiding from his commissioning producers behind a potted plant – and a modest suburban house, home of the odious Trey (Brian D’Arcy James) – a court stenographer who gets his kicks dressing up for Civil War re-enactments – and his Polish partner Magdalena (Joanna Kulig, familiar as the mesmerizing star of Cold War) who cleans houses. Her own house brims with the kind of tension you feel when the man in the next room is cleaning an arsenal of 19th century muskets.
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Magdalena’s daughter Tereza (Harlow Jane) is 16 and committed to her science studies in a way Trey finds disquietingly un-American. He and Magdalena have no idea she is also devoted to boyfriend Julian (Evan Ellison), the equally clever but considerably more privileged son of Stephen’s wife Patricia (Anne Hathaway), until Magdalena comes to clean Patricia’s house and springs her very own daughter eating snacks from Patricia’s fridge. It is the first of several surprise meetings that are both funny and make a larger point.
So Magdalena is cleaning toilets for her daughter’s boyfriend’s family. She feels awkward. At least she can say so. Patricia says nothing, but is visibly trying to skirt around the twin obstacles of her own snobbery: that her son is seeing the cleaner’s daughter and that it bothers her. Surprisingly, in a way, as Patricia loves nothing so much as cleaning herself. As a girl at Catholic boarding school, she confesses, she would sneak peeks into the teaching nuns’ cells and envy their spick-and-span lack of clutter. She would embrace Marie Kondo’s instruction to keep only what gives you joy, except that nothing really does.
She is only slightly less bothered than Trey will be when he finally meets Julian and sees that he is mixed-race. As with that unspoken disquiet about class, he doesn’t have to say a thing to let you know that he is spoiling for a fight. Although nothing is quite as awkward as the situation that ensues after Stephen meets Katrina in a bar while he is walking the dog and ends up on her Spanish-style bedspread; and writes an opera about it (beautifully penned, along with the rest of the music running between scenes like water, by The National’s Bryce Dessner) — which Katrina unexpectedly comes to see on opening night. Well, imagine.
Hathaway is great, Dinklage is great, Tomei is incredible. But there are a lot of comic and dramatic chops being flexed in this film; one reason the central romance is so touchingly persuasive is that it doesn’t have to carry the entire burden of plot or emotion. And perhaps the greatest romance is that salty whiff of life on and below decks.
Katrina is based in Baton Rouge – laissez les bons temps rouler! – but chugs her father’s old boat the length of the coast and the eastern rivers. It’s a rusty old thing, yet picturesque with memorabilia including an old organ in the galley, where Stephen strikes up a tune and the crusty crew sing along as they play roulette at night laissez les bons temps rouler a game with an added element of chance, given the roll of the boat. When Stephen makes his inevitable declaration of love, it’s over a cup of fennel tea on the bridge, with the New Jersey shore visible through a smeared window and Tomei looking gorgeously unglamorous in her boatwoman’s slicker.
What is She Came to Me here to tell us? That it is possible to find true love at 11 a.m. in a dive bar. That if you write an opera about a boat captain in a leather basque, you could have a hit on your hands. That true love can come to us at 16 or 60. That a woman of that age, with no make-up or other discernible facial modifications, can be the most beautiful person in any room. And that a life spent at sea is the life for me. Only in stories, maybe – but then, what are stories for?
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