The most embarrassing Berlin opening film in years
Opening the Berlin Film Festival with a romcom isn’t such a terrible idea, given the commitment to experimental severity often rife in the programme. Alas, Rebecca Miller’s She Came to Me is categorically not the one: a silly eclair of a thing, stuffed with absurd characters committed in near science-fictional ways to not convincing anybody.
Take Steven Lauddem, the opera composer played by a helpless Peter Dinklage, who begins juggling the twin clichés of being depressed and artistically blocked. He has married his therapist, a widow called Patricia (Anne Hathaway), and continues to call her “Doc”; the film titters at their relationship’s weirdness while stranding them in dramedy purgatory. When sex between the couple isn’t scheduled, it’s banned; at all other times, Hathaway’s either scrubbing their kitchen or tending to other clients, while Steven gets shown the door.
It’s on one such enforced stroll that he meets Katrina (Marisa Tomei), a heaven-sent key to unlocking his creative woes. It’s not Tomei’s fault, but entirely Miller’s, that she is a feisty, Jean-Arthur-esque tugboat operator, whom the script is inches away from describing as having “moxie”. (I scribbled that thought down just before we met a salty older crewmate of hers, literally named Moxie.) Katrina admits to being a romance addict who has been arrested for serial stalking, meaning Steven soon regrets being lured below deck for afternoon delight, even if he does get a terrible-looking opera out of it.
There’s a B-plot of mirthless vacuity involving Hathaway’s 18-year-old son (Evan Ellison), whose 16-year-old girlfriend (Harlow Jane) happens to be the daughter of the Lauddems’ new maid (Joanna Kulig). The girl’s petty tyrant of a stepfather (Brian D’Arcy James) is a court stenographer who decides to pursue criminal charges against her beau, forcing them to seek a marriage licence in any nearby state where it’s legal: Delaware, say. These supporting players muddle through while we lose our minds. When James’s character drags the family to some kind of Confederate cosplay event, it’s like an inexplicable detour into Judd Apatow farce, minus the actual farce.
This film started life with Steve Carell, Nicole Kidman and Amy Schumer; the contortions it has gone through to cope with the current cast leave it beached and gurgling. It reaches a nadir with Hathaway’s nervous breakdown, when she gets naked for a needy client, while screaming the word “Kreplaach!” – a type of Jewish dumpling – at the top of her voice. I could try and explain the scene further, but I would fail. Upon recovery, she’s suddenly a nun. I snorted with genuine laughter, hard, at this film’s closing notion of what being a comedy even is.
No cert, 102 min. Premiered at the Berlin Film Festival. A UK release is TBC
