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Peter Dinklage in 'She Came to Me'
Peter Dinklage in 'She Came to Me'
Steven (Peter Dinklage) is a composer with a writer’s block. A patron of the arts insists on seeing a draft of his new opera, but the music isn’t coming. Steven’s been sidelined for several years following a breakdown and is subject to panic attacks. His wife Patricia (Anne Hathaway), a psychotherapist, gives him some common-sense advice: take a walk, it might jog your mind. Hiking the crowded New York streets, he says to himself, “I bet every one of these people has a story for an opera in them.” Soon enough, he encounters his story in a most surprising manner.
She Came to Me is an eccentric romantic comedy by writer-director Rebecca August Miller (Maggie’s Plan). While Steven’s stature as a small man in a tall world goes unaddressed, She Came to Me embraces as many other prejudices and norms as a 19th century novel. Steven and Patricia’s mixed-race son (from her first marriage) goes with a blond girl in his high school, Tereza (Harlow Jane). Julian lives in an elegant Manhattan brownstone and Tereza in a frame house in Brooklyn. They don’t know that Tereza’s mother, Magdalena (Joanna Kulig), is Patricia’s cleaning woman. Young and in love, they are blind to the chasm of class … and yet, imagine everyone’s dismay when Julian brings Tereza home for the first time to find Magdalena cleaning the kitchen floor with Patricia hovering overhead.
When Tereza’s stepdad Trey (Brian d’Arcy James) is shown nude photos of Julian and Tereza, he decides to press charges. Julian is 18, Tereza only 16, and a statutory rape conviction will do more than ruin Julian’s application to Harvard. Undisguised class resentment trigger’s Trey’s reaction, as well as a whiff of unspoken racism about “that kind of boy.”
Oh, what about Steven’s writer’s block? He walks into a random blue-collar bar and is chatted up by Katrina (Marisa Tomei), owner-operator of a tugboat. She lures him onboard, admits that she was arrested for stalking and has an obsessive sexual disorder (is nymphomania still in the Psychiatric Diagnostic Manual?) and—despite Steven worrying over what he’s gotten himself into … Here comes the comedy: He hears music because of the experience, the libretto writes itself as the tale of a sea witch in the sung-spoken, staccato, amelodic manner of late 20th century opera. And somehow, Katrina finds her way to the premiere and begins to stalk.
Despite She Came to Me’s serious themes, the human comedy is seldom absent for long. Patricia is as neurotic as her patients, sweeping tiny crumbs from her kitchen counter with a handheld vacuum cleaner. Unfulfilled by the ethos of de-clutter, she finds herself drawn to the possibility of taking vows as a Catholic nun (their cells are so minimalistic!). Trey is a Civil War reenactor, blind to history’s lessons but with a fussbudget’s insistence on the details of musketry. And Steven? Did he find his muse in the cabin of a tugboat
