Should we laugh or cry at disturbed Alice?
Welcome to Me
Rating:
Starring: Kristen Wiig, James Marsden, Linda Cardellini
Director: Shira Piven
Running time: 105 minutes
Welcome to Me doesn’t really seem like a whole movie so much as a springboard concept for one very killer feature — putting Kristen Wiig in the skin of a blunt, destabilized woman, and then throwing her into our collective face for as many uncomfortable, hilarious and melancholy bits as it can manage.
Wiig’s breakthrough on Saturday Night Live resulted from her playing characters with tenuous grasps on decorum, who tromped all over our comfort zones, from her 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” — reflects this staple aspect of her SNL characterizations, taken to its most confrontational: Welcome to Me is funny mostly because it leaves you laughing, even it it’s 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 high-protein 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 straddle the tenuous divide between pure comedy and disturbing psychology, creating genuine moments of not being sure if you should laugh or cry. Welcome to Me cranks up that dissonance, as the people who circle Alice try to get more of a handle on her. The slick-ish hustler, the head of her network (James Marsden), is fine with letting 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 use sex to reduce his pain, when the right mood grabs her. A grad student, who is also a fan of her show, offers up analysis, blurring 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.
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.