Film Reviews: She Came to Me & Joan Baez I Am a Noise

Make Mine Music

She Came to Me & Joan Baez I Am a Noise

By Marc Glassman

She Came to Me

Rebecca Miller, writer and director

Bryce Dessner, music

Starring: Peter Dinklage (Steven Lauddem), Anne Hathaway (Patricia), Marisa Tomei (Katrina), Joanna Kulig (Magdalena), Harlow Jean (Tereza), Evan Ellison (Julian), Brian d’Arcy James (Trey), Chris Gethard (Patricia’s patient)

It’s hard to categorize Rebecca Miller’s film She Came to Me. Is it a romantic comedy? A satire on the high life in Manhattan? A critique of Americana, including a Civil War battlefield recreation? An absurd tribute to modern opera? The most off-kilter film of the year?

Without a doubt, it features an astonishing score by Bryce Dessner, who is creating a space for himself as one of the finest film composers of his generation—and perhaps much more than that. Dessner, who is part of the Grammy award winning rock band The National, has co-produced albums for Taylor Swift and worked creatively with Sufjan Stevens and Paul Simon but that’s only the pop/mainstream side of his work. Dessner has composed three string quartets for Kronos, a piece for Bang on a Can All Stars, an oratorio, Triptych, with Roomful of Teeth (with the cooperation of their Pulitzer Prize winner Caroline Shaw), a ballet with the Sydney Dance Company and a Concerto for Two Pianos, written for Katia and Marielle Labèque, which premiered with the London Philharmonic Orchestra.

For She Came to Me, Dessner was charged by Miller to create excerpts for two operas, one with a female steamboat captain, who kills her lovers Sweeney Todd-style and the other, about an improbable science fiction romance between a charming alien and a gorgeous Earthling. Dessner’s work is parodic and very well scored, creating two of the finest set pieces in Miller’s lovely hodgepodge of a film. And that work is necessary because the lead character in She Came to Me is a conflicted composer played by Peter Dinklage.

Dinklage’s Steven Lauddem is married to the beautiful, über controlling Patricia (Anne Hathaway), who fell in love with him when he was her psychiatrist. As the film begins, the creatively blocked composer is encouraged by his wife to find something that will inspire him. Steven discovers it when he meets steamboat captain Katrina (Marisa Tomei)—this is Manhattan, still a port—and makes love with her. Inspired, Steven composes his hit opera, though the libretto turns into a dark imaging of a captain who kills her lover. Naturally, Katrina is impressed at being a muse and Steven is horrified since he loves his wife.

She Came to Me has a complex plot with the Steven-Katrina-Patricia situation only being one element in the scenario. Why not complement older lover affairs with a seemingly innocent but potentially illegal one? Patricia’s son, 18-year-old Julian, has fallen in love with a fellow student, 16-year-old Tereza, the daughter of a Polish mother Magdalena, who has recently become Patricia’s cleaner. When Trey, the very conservative husband of Magdalena, finds out through her that the two are sleeping together, he threatens to accuse Julian of statutory rape. 

Meanwhile the beautiful but extremely unhappy Patricia is having a spiritual crisis. She’s always wanted to help humanity. Is psychiatry the answer? Perhaps she should give it all up and become a nun?

Katrina and Steven have their issues, too—big ones–but luckily they ignore those to figure out a way to help the young lovers by, of all things, getting them married. Aiding the conflicted older lovers is the wonderful Magdalena, who supports her daughter through it all.

Rebecca Miller has come up with a plot that somewhat resembles a screwball comedy from the Thirties. It’s quite crazy and barely makes sense. But it’s full of love and humour and drama. The performances throughout the film are fine, particularly by the young couple, played by Harlow Jean and Evan Ellison, who give charming renditions of what it’s like to be so innocent and in love. Kudos to Anne Hathaway for taking off her clothes—and her psychiatrist mentality—in a key scene. Naturally, Dinklage and Tomei—mismatched—do their best. And let’s not forget the great Joanna Kulig, a Polish star, whose performance in the award-winning film Cold War was revelatory and is terrific in a character role here.

Not enough people are likely to see this very different film. Rebecca Miller has made something truly unusual which should be embraced. I do, and I hope you will, too. Why not see an eccentric film that is memorable and unique?

Joan Baez I Am a Noise

(USA, 2023, 113 min.)

Dir: Miri Navasky, Karen O’Connor & Maeve O’Boyle

Feature documentary w/Joan Baez, Gabriel Harris, Bob Dylan, David Harris, Pauline Baez Bryan

By Marc Glassman

Most documentaries about musicians concentrate on their performances, often contrasting their current work as aging icons with archival footage of them at their height, decades earlier, astonishing audiences with the wonderful work that made them stars. There’s some of that in Joan Baez I Am a Noise, but it may come as no surprise that she and filmmakers Miri Navasky, Karen O’Connor & Maeve O’Boyle have come up with something far more challenging than whether Baez can muster enough gumption and musicality to create a great farewell tour. While we do get to see Joan Baez prepping and performing on her final sold-out international journey, and there are generous clips evoking her past as the most significant American female folk singer of the Sixties, this film is more about the private person who has coped with debilitating depressions and may have been sexually abused as an adolescent. 

Trust Baez, ever the iconoclast, to fight against the notion of the standard artist’s doc. Throughout the film, she downplays her success while emphasizing the doubts and fears that could have overwhelmed her over an undeniably successful 60-year career. Thanks to her own extensive personal collection as well as film sources like Pennebaker’s classic Dylan doc Don’t Look Back, there’s a wealth of material showing how Baez’s astonishing vocal range from soprano to contralto and unaffected natural charm and beauty, made her a star of the American folk scene in the early Sixties when she was barely 20. Baez regards her success as having the right voice and look at the right time, but it was more than that. Her Quaker belief in pacifism and commitment to racial equity combined with an almost naïve approach to her audience made Baez the genuine article: a true exemplar of what was best and most wholesome in the radical movement in America at that time. 

Then there was her relationship with Bob Dylan, whom she helped to make into a star when he was young and starting to write the songs that made him famous: My Back Pages, Chimes of Freedom, It Ain’t Me Babe. There are scenes with her bringing Bobby to the stage—Baez already a huge star–to sing with her, in an act of generosity and love. Then, there’s the heartbreaking parts in Dylan’s British tour a year later, with him a superstar no longer treating Baez with the tremendous love she deserved. In a rare moment in the documentary, Baez at last admits how much Dylan meant to her and how difficult it was to negotiate their eventual and long-standing musical friendship after the love had died.

Baez was one of the star presences when Martin Luther King delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington D.C. in the summer of 1963 and participated in countless civil rights and anti-Vietnam war demonstrations throughout that significant period. In the late Sixties, she married peace activist David Harris and had a son with him, Gabriel, who, decades later, drummed with Baez on her final tour. The marriage didn’t last but both contributed to rearing a boy, who is clearly dedicated towards his mother and seems quite well adjusted. And since the Seventies, Baez admits to no great love relationship, though some must have taken place.

What’s odd in the film is how little Baez makes of her contribution to the counter-cultural movements of the Sixties and Seventies. Like her own musical stardom, she attributes her enormous influence to sheer luck: once again, being the right person at the right time. While it’s true that too many people have presented the Sixties and Seventies’ political movements as being more important than perhaps, they were, one can only feel sad that Baez, who put her life and career on the line countless times, isn’t willing to acknowledge how significant she was for so many people for decades and decades.

Here is where we reach the heart of the matter. Joan Baez has been profoundly unhappy throughout her life. Despite all of her artistic prowess, deep charisma, radical political philosophy, love affairs and, above all, enormous fights against what we used to call “the Establishment,” Baez isn’t persuaded that her life has been worthwhile. At any rate, that’s the feeling, which emerges about Baez by the time the film ends. 

Joan Baez I Am a Noise concentrates on the acclaimed singer’s difficult relationships with her family. We find out that Joan had two sisters–the elder, Pauline, avoided competition by becoming a “silent” weaver while the younger, Mimi, fought with her since both were superb folk singers—and, of course, a mother, Joan (Sr.) and a father, Albert, a physicist and co-inventor of the X-ray microscope. As she grew older, Mimi, the beauty in the family, remembered that their father once kissed her passionately on the lips; soon after, Joan began to recall similar episodes. A good part of the film deals with Mimi and Joan’s possibly “false” memories—though they could be true. 

Much of this persuasive documentary is taken up with Joan’s psychological state over the years. It’s dismayingly accurate that Joan Baez has been unhappy throughout her career and that fame has not particularly helped her depression. To the outsider, Joan Baez is a gifted admirable figure and, of course, she understands that. She knows she’s loved but does she love herself? One thing is sure: Joan Baez is more than a noise.