Anne Hathaway is married to Peter Dinklage while he is having an affair with Marisa Tomei. And that’s not all…
Writer-director Rebecca Miller, to whom we owe Maggie’s Got a Plan and The Private Life of Pippa Lee, imagines a series of intrigues that lose both comedy and romance because of their surreality.
In modern-day New York, Steven (Peter Dinklage) is an opera composer. His marriage to Patricia (Anne Hathaway) is not the happiest; the psychiatrist’s wife is a compulsive housekeeper and expresses the desire to join the orders. Looking for inspiration, Steven meets Katrina (Marisa Tomei), the captain of a tugboat, with whom he has a brief affair that leads to the composition of an opera.
At the same time, Julian (Evan Ellison), Patricia and Steven’s son, who has just turned 18, and Tereza (Harlow Jane), 16, are madly in love. But now Tereza’s father-in-law (Brian d’Arcy James) does not see this love positively, probably because his daughter-in-law is the child of Magdalena (Joanna Kulig), Patricia’s housekeeper. The man, a fan of American Civil War battle reenactments, decides to end the romance by accusing Julian of rape because of the age difference between the two lovebirds.
These three storylines, whose dialogue quickly becomes bombastic – at the expense of the characters’ spontaneity – are intertwined with a wealth of detail, but they fail to arouse anything other than a remote curiosity in the viewer. Rebecca Miller – often mentioned as the wife of Daniel Day-Lewis and daughter of Arthur Miller – has always gravitated toward the almost surreal. Here, despite excellent scenes, she does a little too much, like Anne Hathaway’s moment of madness that ends in a long scream, or the meeting between Peter Dinklage, always excellent, and Marisa Tomei.
Rating: 3 out of 5
She Came to Me hits theaters on October 6th.