“She Came to Me” director Rebecca Miller unpacks the complicated women played by Anne Hathaway and Marisa Tomei
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In She Came to Me, Anne Hathaway and Marisa Tomei play two very different women.
Hathaway portrays Patricia Jessup-Lauddem, a therapist and mother, while Tomei is tugboat captain and general mess of a human, Katrina Trento. The two serve as the opposing poles in opera composer Steven Lauddem's (Peter Dinklage) life.
Patricia is Steven's wife, one increasingly distant as she's consumed by her work and the pressures of life. Katrina becomes his unexpected one-night-stand, a woman he beds while searching for inspiration for his new opera. Plagued by writer's block, Steven faces a looming deadline, only to find his block erased by his sexual encounter.
Vertical Films Anne Hathaway and Marisa Tomei in 'She Came to Me'
"There is a lot of mirroring and symmetry hidden in the film," writer-director Rebecca Miller tells EW about how the actresses ground the women in varied ways. "I wanted to emphasize how Anne's character, Patricia, is isolated in her own life; she has built a successful career helping others as a therapist, and spends her time at home helping her husband and son and making her house perfect, yet her soul is neglected. She finds herself consumed by a great spiritual hunger and can't bear living in this materialistic world anymore."
"Marisa's character, Katrina, is also a powerfully capable woman who runs a whole boat, but has given up on ever having a life partner because she's too messed up," Miller continues. "They're both boxed into the identities they have created for themselves until they are freed. In fact, I'd say the film is a great unwinding of lives, a process of liberation for all of them, but not in ways which our culture expects. It's a gently counter-cultural narrative."
As Steven, Dinklage is the narrative focal point around which the lives of these two women circulate. "Peter is one of the greatest actors working today," Miller says of the multiple Emmy winner. "He has the rare combination of perfect comic timing and emotional depth, plus enormous charisma. He's a movie star and a character actor in one. Peter understood how to portray a musician — maybe in part because his brother is a violinist — and he made the dilemma of being alienated from your own life, your own luck, so personal, so believable. No one unpacks existential anxiety like he does!"
Ultimately, Miller wanted to explore the "mysteries of creativity" in all its varied forms, and how there are limits to what therapy is able to unlock in each of us.
"So, even though I myself have greatly benefited from therapy, and believe it can be a creative process in itself, I think every human being is a mystery, so endlessly deep that it will keep me thinking about characters for the rest of my life," reflects Miller. "That's what impels me to keep making films: my bottomless curiosity about people, and how wonderfully complex they are."
She Came to Me is in theaters now.
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