Express at Berlinale: Peter Dinklage’s She Came To Me is light-hearted yet meaningful

She Came To Me is a grown-up contemporary comedy laced with romance, starring an eye-catching ensemble, led by Peter Dinklage, Anne Hathaway, and Marisa Tomei.

Peter Dinklage in She Came To Me. (Photo: Protagonist Pictures)

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I’ve just finished watching Rebecca Miller’s ‘She Came To Me’, the opening film of the 73rd Berlinale, and I’m smiling. First, because it breaks the opening film jinx that afflicts even the most A-list film festivals: this one is a perfect opener, light-hearted yet meaningful. And second, even more importantly, because it is a grown-up contemporary comedy laced with romance, starring an eye-catching ensemble, led by Peter Dinklage, Anne Hathaway, and Marisa Tomei. It is a crowd-pleaser, yes, but it does not pander.

Meet the odd-bods, in fact the oddest of bods we’ve seen in a while, all in search of something. Steven Laudden (Dinklage) plays a composer whose blue eyes and a wild head of hair tries to hide, unsuccessfully, the despair of a creative block. Hathaway is Patricia, Steven’s former-therapist-current-wife, whose propensity for cleanliness is a manifestation of an inner desire to square herself away. She’s all for her husband to experience something new, but as someone who helps her clients to express their innermost feelings, she may have first wanted to question her enthusiasm for getting him out of the house. Would Freud take it to mean, out of her life?

A run-in with Katrina (Tomei) a tug-boat captain, a love-and-sex addict, coming out of rehab, becomes an unexpected break-through for Steven. But perhaps expectedly, it doesn’t just stay that way. The feelings kindled between a locked-in musician, and a frumpy-funny-strong woman, who feels that she is lucky to have a job like hers because it comes with a snug cabin to curl up in, where naughty things can happen, or not.

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A couple of teenagers, madly in love, are the steadiest of this bunch. You’d expect horny teens to get it on, and get on with it, but these two, the sixteen year old daughter of conservative parents who work blue-collar jobs, and the eighteen year old, Patricia’s son from an earlier marriage, are convinced about their love for each other. Cynical adults might wince at their exhortations of love for each other, because we know it is the most fragile thing. But seeing them happiest around each other, you hope that it will be a lifetime thing for them.

What Miller does for Dinklage, who has a form of dwarfism, though, is truly a game-changer. When the gorgeous Hathaway and Dinklage stand side-by-side, she, tall and lithe, he, not even capping five feet, a couple of characters, brought in for this very purpose, are given a chance to snigger. But once that’s out of the way, the film treats Dinklage with the respect he is due– it’s not his height that’s the problem, it’s the block he’s stopped up with. But once the juices begin flowing, music revs up again, and Miller gives us a happily-ever-after. What else is a good romantic comedy for?

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