Steven Lauddem has had more than his share of success. I mean, he’s lauded by contemporary opera fans and classicists alike. A composer extraordinaire!
Problem is, Steven is struggling with massive depression mixed with writer’s block. And for an adoring public waiting for the next great opera, well, that’s not such a welcome blend. Sure, it’s only been five years since his last piece lit up the stage. But in this artistic world, composer years and dog years aren’t so far apart.
Steven even went so far as to marry his therapist, Patricia, for a little extra boost. No, that’s not the only reason they married, but it can’t hurt if your therapist sleeps in the same bed with you. Am I right?
Anyway, after his frustrated librettist finally walks away, and in the face of a looming deadline, Steven is particularly frazzled. He’s even having a hard time getting out of bed at this point. So Patricia does the best thing she can think of. She helps him dress, hands him the dog’s leash (connected to the dog) and shoves him out of the house to take a walk.
Maybe he can break his patterns. Meet new people. And the musical ideas will come a-flowin’.
And it works. Kinda.
Steven meets, of all people, a female tugboat captain named Katrina. She gives him (and his dog) a tour of her boat. And before you can holler “Ahoy, sailor,”they end up sleeping together (without the dog).
Dog or no, the ideas begin to flow. Steven crafts a musical tale of a romance-obsessed tugboat captain who kills her victims between her tugboat bedsheets. It’s a hit. Sorta like a female Sweeny Todd, critics say. Everyone loves it … including Katrina. In fact, she’s been restationed right there in Brooklyn. And she’s very eager to continue being Steven’s muse.
Oh, did I mention that Katrina was once jailed for stalking?
Yep. Looks like Steven will need to learn how to navigate more than a piano keyboard. And that’s just the tip of his oncoming iceberg of problems.
Did I mention that his stepson is being accused of statutory rape and his wife, Patricia, is thinking of becoming a nun?
Hmmm. How do you weave all of that into an opera?
Steven’s stepson, Julian, and the boy’s high school girlfriend, Teresa, are in love. And though everyone around them suggests that they’re too young to start making long-term plans together, they do anyway. And when other issues come up (more on that below), they both are eager to get married.
Teresa’s mother, Magdalena, isn’t happy about her daughter’s youthful choice. She tells the girl that she made a similar choice (having baby Teresa) in her youth that took so much from her. But she also voices her love and gratefulness for having her daughter in her life. And eventually she makes a choice to support Teresa in whatever way she can, rather than alienate her. “I choose you,” Magdalena tells her daughter.
Steven apologizes to Katrina for hurtful statements he made to her in the midst of their relational struggles. And she apologizes as well for her choices.
Katrina gets ordained as a minister online through the Universal Church. Then she performs a marriage.
Patricia has something of an obsession with cleanliness, which she connects to the kind of orderly and somewhat barren life of a nun. After mentioning that out loud to someone, she begins decluttering her life and donating items to the local church. Then she has a moment, when visiting a Catholic sanctuary, when she sits and looks adoringly at a depiction of Jesus being crucified. Later, she walks into a nun’s sparce bedroom and lays down on the small, neat bed with tears in her eyes. She then states that she’s interested in joining a local nunnery and turning her life over to the church.
For all of that, however, She Came to Me leaves the door open to the interpretation that Patricia may only be acting out her obsession with cleanliness rather than acting on faith. The film uses her choice to become a nun by movie’s end as one last wry bit of humor when we see her dressed in a nun’s habit. But …
… before Patricia makes her choice to become a nun, she has something of a mental breakdown that’s tinged with sexual undertones. After struggling with her desire to clean up and simplify her life, she walks into her office and strips in front of a patient who told her he had moments of imagining her naked. She strips off all her clothes, but the patient’s head strategically blocks our view of her naked body.
Early in the film we see Teresa and Julian kissing while dressed just in underwear. As they lie down next to each other on the bed, it becomes obvious that they are planning to have sex. Teresa asks if they can take a selfie (which they do), wondering if “I’ll look different after?”
Later, a box of pictures is discovered. And it contains pics of Teresa and Julian together in posed, slightly revealing images. (Some pictures show Teresa topless but strategically covered.) Teresa’s mom is disappointed in her 16-year-old daughter’s choices. But Teresa’s stepdad, Trey, takes things a step further. He records Teresa admitting they had “protected” sex and, along with the pictures, moves to have Julian charged with statutory rape, since the teen is 18.
Katrina tells a story about stalking a famous actor and being arrested after stripping naked in his trailer. During the affair between her and Steven, she strips down to a corset and underwear and then proceeds to pull his clothing off. The camera cuts away, and we see her later wearing only stockings and covered by a well-placed bed pillow.
After having his sexual fling with Katrina, Steven falls off the pier her tug is tied up to and it appears as if he might be drowning. But in fact, he has an underwater moment of clarity when the idea and music for an opera crystalize in his mind.
Teresa’s stepdad, Trey, doesn’t get violent with his stepdaughter, but he does pull her roughly to their car to force her to obey him. (Her mom is waiting there.)
Four uses of the f-word, one s-word and one use of “d–n” are heard in the dialogue.
Steven and Katrina both have drinks at a bar. Steven takes some prescription pills.
Based on Trey’s statements and reactions, the film lightly suggests that his actions are driven by more than just a sense of protection for his stepdaughter. And Teresa says it outright: “He’s a pompous little racist dictator.” (Julian is of mixed racial background.)
She Came to Me desperately wants to be the oddball rom-com you didn’t know you wanted. It works hard at connecting viewers to a world where urbane city dwellers marry their therapists, stumble awkwardly into affairs with strange tugboat captains and write operas about it all. And the film delivers all of its offbeat, big-city whimsy via a stable of fully invested stars, each giving the acting task before them their quirky best.
There are some interesting characters here, to be sure. And, yes, some of those characters make laudable choices in the midst of many poor ones. But for all of its effort, the film as a whole doesn’t quite hold together.
Its wry is a bit too dry. Its jokes too few. And its romance barely qualifies as a randy crush.
This pic is sorta like an inside joke that none of the head-scratching listeners really gets. And as you probably already figured out, it’s a dirty, R-rated joke to boot.
After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.
