WELCOME TO ME
★★★ 1/2
Welcome to Me doesn’t really seem like a whole movie so much as a springboard for one very killer feature: putting Kristen Wiig in the skin of a blunt, destabilized woman, and then throwing her into our face for as many uncomfortable, hilarious and melancholy bits as it can manage.
Wiig’s breakthrough on Saturday Night Live was playing characters with tenuous grasps on decorum who tromped all over our comfort zones, from her TMI Target cashier to grossout-sexy Shanna to Dooneese, her physically warped backup singer. Alice Klieg — a woman with borderline personality disorder who worships at the shrine of Oprah and is prone to opening conversations with “I have a prepared statement” — is this tendency taken to its most confrontational: Welcome to Me is funny mostly because it tears apart any other possible response, leaves you laughing just to hide your own discomfort.
Alice is a recent lottery winner so disturbed at being cut off during her acceptance speech — right on the line “I’ve been using masturbation as a sedative since 1991” — she looks up a cable-access channel and drops $15 million on 100 episodes of her own talk show. Also called Welcome to Me, it’s all Alice, all the time: when she is not making (and eating) meat loaf pie as part of her highprotein diet, she’s scoring a telephone conversation with her concerned, overbearing mother or staging slanderous re-enactments from her life — complete with bitter, wounded narration, provided by herself.
Even these scenes spread themselves out across stages of pure comedy and disturbing psychology: genuine moments of not being sure if you should laugh or cry. Welcome to Me turns that dissonance up as the people who circle Alice try to get more of a handle on her. The slick-ish hustler at head of her network (James Marsden) is fine to let Alice make a fool of herself as long as the cheques cash; his more sensitive brother ( Wes Bentley) feels mildly guilty and exploitative, but is happy to let Alice f--k his pain away, when the right mood grabs her. A grad student fan of her show blurs her into a barely human signifier of outsider art, any hints of mental instability just part of her genius. Even her close friend Gina (Linda Cardellini) is cheery and supportive until Alice’s bluntness cuts too deep.
In short, everyone is happy to overlook what might be serious problems as long as they’re getting what they want from Alice, a fact the film is happy to turn on its viewers, too. There are plenty of blunt, laugh-out-loud moments that play directly off Alice’s turbulent personality; they’re usually followed with subtly gutting ones, blurring Alice’s intentions into something far more discombobulating.
Though it is shaggy and loose — almost mirroring Alice’s onthe-fly talk show — Welcome to Me wants to confront us with how casually and confusingly we tend to treat mental illness,
It’s funny mostly because it tears apart any other possible response
laughing in its face or vaguely romanticizing it or tightly stigmatizing it. Wiig as Alice is one of the most fulsomely human portrayals of mental illness put to screen, her lack of barriers a cause and effect of how everyone, including the viewers, receives her; if Welcome to Me is a dark comedy, it’s only because there’s something brutally funny and mimetically true in the arm’s-length embrace of people operating on the fringes of normality, whatever we think that means. ★★★1/2