Author and film-maker Rebecca Miller isn’t known for humour exactly, but she brings a sprightly sort of sweetness and preposterous innocence to this quirky-naive romantic comedy that she has written and directed, something with wit and fun but also ultimately an almost childlike seriousness - like a Woody Allen movie or a screwball but played at two-thirds of the speed and with fewer cynical wisecracks.
The excellent cast brings a prosecco sparkle. Peter Dinklage is Steven Lauddem, a celebrated opera composer, difficult, demanding and now creatively blocked, married to fashionable New York therapist Patricia (Anne Hathaway), a gorgeous fashion plate with a love of neatness and an obsession with nuns. Steven is stepfather to her teen son Julian (Evan Ellison) who is dating Tereza (Harlow Jane), whose mum Magdalena (Joanna Kulig) is the Lauddems’ cleaner. Does that potentially awkward situation sound familiar? Could it be that Rebecca Miller, like the rest of us, spent her lockdown watching the TV adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Normal People on BBC iPlayer?
The crisis arrives when Steven has a fling with Katrina, a tugboat captain with a romantic love addiction (played with verve by Marisa Tomei), and their bizarre one-afternoon-stand encounter inspires an opera which is none too complimentary about Katrina. Tereza is also in deep trouble when her technically-underage relationship is discovered by coldly disciplinarian stepdad Trey (Brian d’Arcy James), a pompous nitwit who likes dressing up in Confederate military garb in historical re-enactments for the “period rush”.
It all canters along cordially and amusingly enough, ingeniously tying up Katrina’s destiny with everyone else’s, though maybe it’s a little fastidious – like Patricia – about hitting the laughs. And the final moments emphasise a dreamy sort of healing and togetherness when another sort of film would have given us a real-time wedding scene and an explicit comeuppance for the awful Trey. But it’s a likeable confection, and a pleasure to see Marisa Tomei on very good form.
• She Came to Me screened at the Berlin film festival.
