Berlin Film Festival 2023
Dinklage plays a composer writing an opera about his affair with tugboat captain Marisa Tomei in a Normal People comedy directed by Rebecca Miller
Author and filmmaker Rebecca Miller isn’t exactly known for humor, but she brings a lively sense of sweetness and absurdist innocence to this quirky-naïve romantic comedy she wrote and directed, somewhat witty and fun, but ultimately almost childish Serious – like a Woody Allen film or a screwball, but played at two-thirds the speed and with less cynical quips.
Rebecca Miller: There is a chasm between you and your children. They speak another language’
The excellent cast brings a Prosecco sparkle. Peter Dinklage is Steven Lauddem, an acclaimed opera composer, difficult, demanding and now creatively blocked, married to fashionable New York therapist Patricia (Anne Hathaway), a gorgeous fashionista with a love of neatness and an obsession with nuns. Steven is stepfather to their teenage son Julian (Evan Ellison), who is dating Tereza (Harlow Jane), whose mother Magdalena (Joanna Kulig) is the Lauddems’ cleaning lady. Does this potentially uncomfortable situation sound familiar? Could it be that, like the rest of us, Rebecca Miller has spent her lockdown watching the TV adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Normal People on BBC iPlayer?
Crisis comes when Steven has an affair with Katrina, a tugboat captain with a romantic love addiction (played with panache by Marisa Tomei), and their bizarre afternoon encounter inspires an opera that’s not overly flattering to Katrina. Tereza is also in deep trouble when their technically underage relationship is discovered by coldly disciplining stepfather Trey (Brian d’Arcy James), a pompous git who likes to dress up in Confederate military garb in historical reenactments for the “period rush.”
It all gallops along heartily and amusingly enough, ingeniously merging Katrina’s fate with everyone else’s, though perhaps a little fussy – like Patricia – about providing laughs. And the final moments emphasize a dreamy kind of healing and togetherness, while a different kind of film would have given us a real-time wedding scene and explicit compensation for the awful Trey. But it’s a likable confection and it’s a pleasure to see Marisa Tomei in very good form.
• She Came to Me was screened at the Berlin Film Festival.
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