She Came to Me: Dinklage Finally Gets the Girl

I have a friend who says the world doesn’t need another angry dwarf. —Peter Dinklage

Peter Dinklage is arguably the most successful and gifted dwarf actor of all time. He is the most recent in a long line of famous Hollywood small actors (or midgets), beginning with Kurt Schneider and his sister Hilda, who starred in the 1932 classic Freaks (see Quadrant, May 2024, and, with their two siblings, as the Munchkins in the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz.

Others we have noticed, but perhaps not really seen, have been Warwick Davis and black actor Tony Cox (Willow, 1988), Zelda Rubinstein (Poltergeist, 1982), Verne Troyer (Mini-Me in Austin Powers, 1997), Hervé Villechaize (Tattoo in Fantasy Island, 1977), Michael Anderson (Twin Peaks, 1990) and Kenny Baker (R2-D2 in Star Wars, 1977).

Dinklage is unique, however, in that he has refused to take any roles—such as elves or leprechauns—usually offered to actors with these kind of conditions. He once said that his ideal role was “the romantic lead … who gets the girl”. In the 2023 romantic comedy She Came to Me he finally gets his chance, opposite two stunning co-stars, Anne Hathaway and Marisa Tomei.

The film’s evocative soundtrack was composed by Bryce Dessner, known for his collaborations with the Kronos Quartet and Taylor Swift—odd bedfellows indeed. In fact, the wonderful music in the film, a convincing fusion of pop and classic, is the prime reason I decided to review it.

The film opens at a party, in Brooklyn, New York, with a countertenor, Anthony Roth Costanzo, singing the “Habanera” aria, L’amour est un oiseau rebelle (Love is a rebellious bird) from Carmen, by Georges Bizet. Steven Lauddem (played by Dinklage), an intensely shy composer, has writer’s block and can’t complete the score for his current commissioned opera. Somewhat of a hypochondriac, he meanders uncomfortably among the guests, looking for a place to escape where he can take his pulse. He had a nervous breakdown after completing his last opera and is depressed because he can’t compose. His librettist has just quit to go and work for one of his competitors. Patricia (Anne Hathaway), his wife, is a psychiatrist who has OCD (Obsessive Cleaning Disorder). She says, “For me the whole ‘clutter’ thing is more than just neatness; it’s like a spiritual cleanliness.” She admires the austerity of the local Catholic nuns.

She suggests to her husband that he go and walk their French bulldog and try to find some inspiration to finish his score. As Lauddem passes people on the street, he talks to himself: “I’ll bet every one of these people has a story for an opera in them.”

Going into a bar for a drink, he meets a tomboyish tugboat captain, Katrina Trento (Marisa Tomei), who spends her shore-leave picking up men in bars for sex. She asks him what he does for a living. He mumbles sotto voce that he is a composer. She misunderstands and remarks, “A composter?” She invites him to her boat, confesses to him that she has a diagnosed obsession, is “addicted to romance” and seduces him. Lauddem (bearing Dinklage’s “furrowed unsmiling charismatic gravitas”, as Owen Gleiberman of Variety calls it), doesn’t resist.

Inadvertently, Lauddem has now found an unlikely muse in Trento and is inspired to complete his work, She Came to Me (Tugboat Opera), based on their brief affair. However, he changes her character into a serial killer. Opening night is a great success, both his wife and Trento attending the performance. One excited audience member calls it “a female Sweeney Todd”. Trento confesses to him privately in the foyer that she is in love with him, but Lauddem can’t handle it and runs off.

Meanwhile Lauddem’s eighteen-year-old son Julian is dating under-age Tereza, the sixteen-year-old daughter of their cleaning lady. Neither set of parents know about this affair until her mother, Magdalena, discovers a collection of Polaroid snapshots of the two teens in bed together. When she shows the photos to her narrow-minded and disciplinarian husband, Trey, he decides, against his wife’s objections, to prosecute Julian on statutory rape charges.

Gleiberman remarks: “This is no quirk to laugh off. It’s one more way that the surface airiness of [the story] touches a jangled nerve of reality. The way it’s all resolved becomes the engine of the film’s second half.”

Brian d’Arcy James is brilliant as the controlling father, Trey, who is a fanatic about participating in American Civil War re-enactments with muskets and authentic costumes. He refers to this hobby as “period rush—the feeling of actually going back in time”.

Trento obsessively begins to follow Lauddem and confronts him on the street. He acknowledges that she has inspired him to get over his writer’s block, but tells her that he is married, it was just a one-night stand, and suggests that she should seek professional help for her “romance” addiction. She agrees and promptly books a session with his psychiatrist wife. She confesses the affair to her.

Shattered, Lauddem’s wife decides to leave him—and her unsatisfying work as a psychiatrist. She says, “I really love cleaning. Sometimes when my patients are talking, I imagine myself getting inside their heads with a bottle of disinfectant and really scrubbing them down.” One of the exciting highpoints of the movie is her final session with a patient who, through transference, has become obsessed with imagining her naked. Usually, she ignores his comments but this time she does a brilliant striptease in front of him while explaining in detail how to make a kreplach (Jewish dumpling). She ends the recipe by doing a primal scream in his face. Then she decides to enter the local convent.

Lauddem discovers that the laws in the neighbouring state of Delaware allow sixteen-year-olds to marry with the written permission of only one parent. Tereza’s mother, who supports the marriage, agrees to sign and a plan is hatched to get the young couple to Delaware, without being stopped by her father.

Lauddem asks Trento to help them by using her tugboat. When Trey discovers that his daughter is missing, he initiates an all-points bulletin on the highways but has no idea the elopement is happening at sea. On board, Lauddem tells Trento that has now fallen in love with her. Inspired by the wedding, he composes a moving new work, Hurry Hurry (Alien Opera).

American director Rebecca Miller was born in 1962, the daughter of the playwright Arthur Miller. She is married to actor Sir Daniel Day-Lewis, who was the second child of the former British Poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis. She studied painting, literature and sculpture at Yale. Her book, Personal Velocity, a collection of prose portraits of women, won the Washington Post Best Book of 2001. She adapted it into a feature film of the same name in 2002, receiving the Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize. Miller also wrote the screenplay for the film version of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play Proof (2005), starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Anthony Hopkins.

Peter Dinklage is 1.35 metres (four feet five inches) tall and has a form of dwarfism called achondroplasia, a genetic disorder which affects bone growth. He is married to theatre director Erica Schmidt, and they have two children. He is best known for playing Tyrion Lannister in the series Game of Thrones for which he won the Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actor four times.

Dinklage has recently criticised Seven Dwarfs, the planned Disney live-action remake of the 1937 animated film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. He told Marc Maron on Maron’s podcast:

I was a little taken aback when they were very proud to cast a Latina actress as Snow White … take a step back and look at what you’re doing there. It makes no sense to me, you’re progressive in one way and you’re still making that f***ing backwards story about seven dwarfs living in a cave together, what the f*** are you doing, man?

Other small-stature actors have taken umbrage at his remarks, claiming he is trying to reduce the limited number of roles available for dwarves. Dylan Postl, a WWE wrestler (Hornswoggle) who starred in the horror film, Leprechaun: Origins, said: “It makes me so sick to my stomach to think that there are seven roles for dwarfs that can’t get normal acting roles, or very few and far between roles and now they are gone because of this guy.” Lauren Brooks, a talent agent who has represented dwarf actors for fifteen years, said: “If he doesn’t want the competition then that is pretty selfish for him to deny other people the right to work.”

But perhaps Dinklage, with his profound acting skills, is actually trying to expand the kind of roles available. The character of Steven Lauddem in She Came to Me could have been played by an actor of any size.

Anne Hathaway began her career as a child actress. In 1990, at eight years old, she watched her actress-singer mother, Kate Hathaway, perform as French prostitute Fantine in the first national theatre tour of Les Misérables.

As a teen, she was first typecast in the roles of princesses appearing in family-oriented films and Disney productions, often referred to as a “children’s role model”. But in 2004, she said:

In terms of the princess role, there is only so long that you can play those as a young lady before you start feeling really ridiculous. They are so much fun to do, I figure I might as well get the most out of them while I can. Then [I’ll] go off and play all the drug addicts and the prostitutes, and all the good ones you win Oscars for a little bit later on.

In a full circle, in 2012 she won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for the role of Fantine, in the musical film adaption of Les Misérables. Hathaway’s version of “I Dreamed a Dream”, from the film, reached number sixty-nine on the Billboard pop charts.

Marisa Tomei appeared in Chaplin (1992) as the silent film star Mabel Normand, alongside her boyfriend at the time, Robert Downey Jr in the lead role. In the same year, she won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, in My Cousin Vinny.

Bryce Dessner composed the score for the film. The haunting ancillary music throughout is primarily written for the piano and played by French concert pianist Katia Labèque. The librettos for the two opera fragments, She Came to Me (Tugboat Opera) and Hurry Hurry (Alien Opera) were written by the film’s director, Rebecca Miller.

It is quite inspiring to watch how a simple dramatic plot idea—such as Lauddem’s seduction on the tugboat—is reinterpreted into a score for a modern opera. It is a short lesson on libretto writing. When Lauddem says to himself, on his dogwalk, “I’ll bet every one of these people has a story for an opera in them,” he really means it and we can see practically how this can be done.

Dessner and his twin brother Aaron are acclaimed guitarist-composers, who are part of a band called The National. They are both known for their collaborations with other influential musicians. Bryce Dessner has worked with Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Paul Simon and Ryuichi Sakamoto amongst many others. He did the orchestrations for Taylor Swift’s studio album Folklore, which was produced by his brother, Aaron. The album won a Grammy for Album of the Year in 2021. Both brothers have an impressive litany of achievements including installations, scores for modern dance and ballet and music festival curations.

In a quirky bit of nonsense, the twins were named the “243rd greatest guitarist of all time” by Rolling Stone in 2023, which demonstrates beyond doubt the complete irrelevance of these “best of” polls in the arts.

If I have one criticism of the way the Dessners compose, it would be too much dependence on sequenced loop-based Philip Glass-style repetition in the foundations of their musical ideas, rather than exposition of melodic themes, using traditional classic devices such as retrograde, inversion and counterpoint. Dessner’s true gifts shine in the two short operatic fragments which top and tail the movie.

The musical weak point of the film, for me, was a song especially written by Bruce Springsteen and his wife, Patti Scialfa, “Addicted to Romance”, which was sung over the end credits. Although Springsteen is said to have composed this song with Scialfa, he is given sole song writing credit in the end titles, with his wife only mentioned on “background vocals”. Springsteen’s voice has now descended into the old-man speak-sing timbre of Tom Waits. The song itself is C-grade, at best, with none of the grace and intelligence of his earlier work. Robert Palmer’s 1986 song “Addicted to Love” captured the same idea much more convincingly.

The lyrics to Springsteen’s song are forced and tepid:

There’s whiskey and it’s water

And it’s one last dance

Stranger, pump that jukebox with your quarters

We all deserve a second chance

Darling, let me tell you your future

Slip your palm into my hands

You’ve got me addicted to romance.

By illustration, simply substitute any noun for romance here and the verse has exactly the same meaning: addicted to football, chocolate, surfing or needlepoint.

It’s embarrassing that this seventy-five-year-old songwriter, who has sold more than 140 million records and has won twenty Grammy Awards, is still churning out throw-away lyrics like this. The song is poorly enunciated, mumbled and practically incomprehensible without a lyric sheet. Springsteen was awarded the 2016 Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Obama and the 2021 National Medal of Arts from President Biden but you wouldn’t know it from this song. It once again brings to mind Napoleon’s remark, “It is with such baubles that men are led.”

This is just one more in a long line of mediocre and contrived pop songs written over end credits of fine films that have nothing to do with advancing the emotion and content of the movie—but merely a marketing decision to promote the film and sell soundtrack albums. An evocative operatic instrumental by Dessner would have been more appropriate.

Reviews and criticism of the movie have been all over the place, from humorous to downright bitchy. My favourite kind of film!

Barry Hertz, of the Globe and Mail, writes, “Finally, a film that reveals the secret sex lives of tugboat captains.” Owen Gleiberman of Variety, said, “[Katrina is] played by Marisa Tomei with the exact sort of slovenly moth-eaten desperate avidity you see in day drunks who’ll connect with you at the drop of an ice cube.”

David Rooney of the Hollywood Reporter quipped: “basically, she’s Popeye the Sailor Man reincarnated as a sensual earth mother.”

Nell Minow of RogerEbert.com, praised the film, “beautifully performed and directed with great charm, unexpected wisdom, and sweetness”. David Katz of the Film Stage, was lukewarm: “She Came to Me has designs on being a grand opera, but it’s definitely more of what the British call a panto.” Rooney actually hated it:

[A] clunky multistrand romance with such a case of whimsy that almost none of its characters or their relationships ring true … Hathaway’s transition from therapist to postulant is a lurch no actor should be asked to navigate, and if you thought we were done with nervous breakdowns as a plot device to justify women’s illogical behaviour you were wrong.

But Gleiberman defended this very quality: “The movie’s main figures aren’t just suffering from off-kilter dilemmas—they have problems we might characterize as everyday mental illness. The film’s gentle audacity is that it dares to posit mental illness as the new normal.”

In the film, Katrina declares she is “addicted to romance” and is looking for a man who “would come and sweep a woman off her feet”. But this is not love or even romance. This is a girl looking for a father, combined with sex compulsion.

The premise of being “addicted to romance” shows a lack of understanding of the true foundations and motivations behind romantic love. The Greeks have three words for love: agape (transcendent spiritual love—unconditional—the love of God for humans), eros (erotic love) and philia (brotherly love). Dr Bianca P. Acevedo says:

Many believe that romantic love is the same as passionate love. It isn’t. Romantic love has the intensity, engagement and sexual chemistry that passionate love has, minus the obsessive component. Passionate or obsessive love includes feelings of uncertainty and anxiety. This kind of love helps drive the shorter relationships but not the longer ones.

Romantic love is high in passion and intimacy, but without commitment. It is real and genuine, but only as an initial visionary stage of intimate connection. Dr Liberty Kovacs says, “Romantic love is by far the shortest stage in long-term relationships.” The Collins Dictionary defines it as: “an intensity and idealization of a love relationship in which the other is imbued with extraordinary virtue, beauty, etc, so that the relationship overrides all other considerations, including material ones”.

Romance comes from the French, where initially it indicated a verse narrative. European medieval vernacular tales, epics and ballads generally dealt with chivalric adventure, not bringing in the actual concept of love until late into the seventeenth century. It is an adverb of Latin origin, romanicus, meaning of the Roman style.

Courtly romance originated with the troubadours, or French trouveres, of the eleventh century. The nobles of the time patronised artists. Musicians entertained at the courts. The troubadours celebrated the refined and noble aspects of “romantic” love with songs about idealised relationships between knights and noblewomen. A troubadour often dedicated his music to a “lady” of the court. These women were of a different class, often married with children, and a common troubadour would not have any kind of personal or sexual contact with his romantic Muse, unless it was an aberration.

The classic medieval story of Tristan and Iseult is the best template for the pitfalls of blinker-visioned romantic love. Tristan is happily married. He is engaged in a mission to escort the Princess Iseult from Ireland to marry his uncle and then he will return home to his beloved wife. But Tristan and Iseult fall victim to a love potion which causes them to become obsessed with each other.

This is not real love—both have been compelled by an artificial spell. Addiction plays no part in it. The lesson here is that romantic love, as an absolute, can often blind and obliterate the potential for authentic love relationships.

Dr Marni Feuerman says that, in real authentic love, “People stop thinking about other potential partners they may be missing out on. They believe that the grass is greener where they water it.”

She Came to Me is a rewarding screwball comedy whose “excellent cast brings a prosecco sparkle”, as Peter Bradshaw of the Guardian put it. The musical highpoint for me was the operatic fragment, Hurry Hurry (Alien Opera), at the close of the film. With inspirations from Wagner, this magical performance, on multiple viewings now, never fails to arouse deep emotion.

All the characters in She Came to Me are slightly damaged, all looking for love and meaning in life. The final line of the libretto: “My child, you will recover. I must bring you home to your mother,” as the camera pans across the entire cast sitting in the front row of the concert hall, is unforgettable.