'She Came to Me' review: Comic-drama folds under weight of its quirks

No character is too quirky and no situation is too far-fetched for "She Came to Me," a loony, loopy comic-drama where an opera composer with writer's block, a tugboat captain with a history of stalking and a court stenographer who doubles as a Civil War reenactor are on a collision course with fate in modern day Brooklyn.

Writer-director Rebecca Miller ("Maggie's Plan") is seemingly making a comedy out of all of this, or possibly a farce, but the film's tone is all over the place, especially when a subplot about statutory rape is thrown into the mix. "She Came to Me" is trying to be many things, and isn't able to do any of them particularly well.

Peter Dinklage plays Steven, who has suffered a complete mental breakdown since the completion of his last opera, five years ago. He's since married his extremely Type-A therapist, Patricia (Anne Hathaway), whom he calls "Doc" around the house.

Patricia has an 18-year-old son from a previous relationship, Julian (Evan Ellison), who is dating his classmate Tereza (Harlow Jane, daughter of Patricia Arquette and Thomas Jane). Tereza's mother is also Patricia's housekeeper, because in Miller's version of Brooklyn there are only about 10 different people.

Steven, on a walk one day to clear his head, stops in a bar where he meets Katrina (Marisa Tomei), our tugboat captain. They wind up in bed together (on the tugboat!) and Steven's head is cleared, and "She Came to Me" is one of those movies where the lead character has an epiphany while fully submerged underwater. (It's usually a swimming pool, but this time around New York's East River provides the magical cleansing waters.)

Well, Steven writes an opera about a tugboat captain — why change the details? — which gets back to Katrina, because how many operas are there that are written about tugboat captains? Meanwhile, and this is quite the meanwhile, Tereza's father (Brian d'Arcy James), who has been a court stenographer for so long he's practically also a lawyer, decides to pursue legal action against his daughter's boyfriend for statutory rape (he's 18, she's 16), but only after first making her participate in one of his weekend Civil War reenactments. Because priorities.

"She Came to Me's" idiosyncrasies would be easier to swallow if they all didn't feel so manufactured, and the characters and situations didn't feel so aggressively dreamt up inside a screenwriter's head. That's not to say the actors aren't credible — Tomei is hands down the year's best on-screen tugboat captain, and the young Jane is fully believable as a batty eyed high schooler in love — but the whole enterprise feels contrived and full of forced whimsy. Not even a closing song from Bruce Springsteen can ground it in a recognizable version of reality.

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'She Came to Me'

GRADE: C

Rated R: for some language

Running time: 102 minutes

In theaters