Review: ‘She Came to Me’ overdoses on rom-com whimsy, while an ace cast is wasted

It’s only October but your Thanksgiving turkey has arrived. It’s called “She Came to Me,” a mishmash of flimsy, fanciful and far-fetched notions dressed up as a screwball New York rom-com. Given its pedigreed cast and filmmaker, the results are doubly sad.

Remarkably, writer-director Rebecca Miller (“The Ballad of Jack and Rose,” “Maggie’s Plan”) was able to get her wildly convoluted script in front of the cameras and attract the likes of Peter Dinklage, Anne Hathaway and the great Marisa Tomei (who’s circling national-treasure status, this misstep aside). Maybe acclaimed name actors don’t have the pick of roles you’d assume. Or, in the case of this forgettably titled ensemble dud, they’re just gung-ho, cockeyed optimists.

The film, a sort of wan, unfunny cousin to an erstwhile Woody Allen comedy, finds morose and neurotic opera composer Steven Lauddem (a schlumpy, sad-eyed Dinklage) with writer’s block as a commission deadline looms. He’s crashed and burned before, and another failure could tank his allegedly brilliant career. He’s married to his ex-shrink, Patricia (Hathaway), a pencil-skirted neat freak and walking example of the phrase “physician, heal thyself,” who suddenly finds herself curiously, perhaps irrevocably drawn to church — as both a destination and a lifestyle.

Then there’s Katrina (Tomei), an itinerant tugboat operator (because, of course) and, more pivotally, a hopeless romantic with stalking tendencies, whom Steven unexpectedly meets in a bar and promptly sleeps with. Despite his married-man guilt, Steven’s tryst with Katrina jump-starts his creative juices and he refashions his new opera to mirror their surprise encounter. (The difference: Katrina’s stage proxy murders her lovers, causing an opening night fan to gushingly dub it “a female ‘Sweeney Todd’”) It looks awful, but maybe that’s the point.

Peter Dinklage and Marisa Tomei in the movie “She Came to Me.”

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Rounding out this crazy quilt of strained, intersecting story strands and blunt coincidences is a subplot that eventually becomes the main one. It involves a starry-eyed romance between 18-year-old Julian (Evan Ellison), Patricia’s biracial son from her deceased first husband, and his schoolmate Tereza (Harlow Jane), 16, the daughter of Patricia and Steven’s immigrant housekeeper, Magdalena (Joanna Kulig of “Cold War”). All is dreamy between the smitten teens until Magdalena’s husband (and Tereza’s stepdad), Trey (Brian d’Arcy James), a court stenographer, amateur justice warrior and Civil War buff (now there’s a combo), turns protective bulldog when he realizes Julian is breaking the law by having sex with the underage Tereza.

That Trey wants Julian arrested feels like an especially egregious turn given the film’s kooky, whimsical vibe and comes off more as a desperate plot device than any kind of earned story development.

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Before you can say “Romeo and Juliet,” Julian and Tereza are on the lam to avoid Julian’s capture, with Steven, Katrina and Magdalena facilitating the couple’s escape. But not without a preemptive visit to one of Trey’s Civil War reenactments, because apparently things were not sufficiently eccentric.

A lot more happens here, including a few broad bits between Patricia and a lovelorn therapy patient (including a striptease she does to a story about, of all things, kreplach), as well as her ham-fisted exit from her family to follow her “calling.” But it all serves to congest an already sluggish, choppy and exasperating film, one which asks you to suspend your disbelief— big time — with little emotional reward in return. Its overall handling of mental illness is no great shakes either.

The film’s Brooklyn settings are decently captured, the actors all commit as best as they can to their loopy, surfacey parts, and, in a stroke of good fortune, Bruce Springsteen agreed to write a swell song called “Addicted to Romance,” that closes the film on a stirring note. Best to watch the tune’s official lyric video online and call it a day.