Review: Welcome to Me
Thursday, May 7, 2015 at 3:30PM Michael C. here with your non-Avengers review of the week
When we daydream about striking it rich the objects of our fantasies usually fall into tangible, straightforward categories. The things we will buy, the places we will travel, the jobs we will quit. Alice Klieg, the lottery winner with borderline personality disorder played by Kristen Wiig in Shira Piven’s Welcome to Me, has more abstract ideas. Alice has spent her whole life trying and failing to live in the world everyone else seems to inhabit with ease. Now, fresh off the decision to go off her meds and with 86 million at her disposal, she can finally force the rest of us to live in her world.
When we meet Alice prior to striking it rich, she is filling her lonely days watching her vast collection of Oprah episodes on VHS, mouthing the words along with the host. It makes perfect sense then, that when she finds herself thrust into the spotlight her first instinct is to cast herself in the role of self-help guru, albeit one with her own life as her first and only subject. [More...]
Her initial attempt at this transformation doesn’t go down a storm. They cut the cameras around 15 seconds into her taking the mic at the lottery press conference, right after she gets out the line:
I’ve been using masturbation as a sedative since 1981”.
Her second attempt is more successful. Attending a low-rent infomercial where a guy in a pith helmet pushes an algae-based health supplement, Alice locks eyes with the camera with a look of such crazed conviction it unsettles everyone in the control room. Alice gets pulled off the air again after she storms the stage and derails the show by launching into awkward Oprah-esque patter. She responds by offering management a multimillion-dollar check in exchange for a block of airtime she can use to give her delirious inner monologue a platform big enough to match the intensity of her obsessions. Management balks at the ethics of enabling an unstable person but the algae isn’t exactly flying off the shelves so they aren’t in the position to turn down millions. When Alice informs them she wants to make an entrance riding a giant swan, they nod with resignation.
The set up lends itself to broad comedy with segments on Alice's show including titles like “I Can Still Smell You” and a healthy living segment that climaxes in Alice silently eating meatloaf for five minute of uninterrupted airtime, but the most interesting thing about Piven’s direction and Eliot Laurence’s script is how it resists the urge to go for the big, broad laughs which Wiig could surely kill. Welcome to Me doesn’t skip lightly over the reality of Alice’s mental illness and the laughs catch in our throat. Should we be laughing at any of this? It is inherently funny, for example, in a theater of the absurd kind of way, to watch Alice inflate minor incidents from her past to operatic proportions, like in the segment, “Who Tampered With My Makeup Bag” which involves performers reenacting an incident from Alice’s teens when she believed a girl messed with stuff but no one believed her. Yet the funnier it gets the more it teeters on the edge of darkness. For Alice the incident really was that traumatic, and she gets so lost in the scene the she interrupts to shout “liar” at one of the actors.
If character of Alice often risks being more of a writer’s conceit than a fully formed person Wiig makes her hang together through the sheer force of her commitment. She doesn’t betray a hint of awareness anything Alice is doing might be humorous and the restraint pays off. Welcome to Me could lapse into easy “let’s laugh at the kook” gawking or “the crazy ones are really the sanest among us” schmaltz but Wiig keeps it too grounded for Alice to function as a two dimensional punchline or symbol.
In fact, the compelling watchability of Wiig’s performance leads to the film working better than it perhaps should. Having managed the tricky tonal balancing act, Welcome to Me isn’t quite sure where to go with it, dabbling in a number of themes and subplots without extracting much meaning from any of them. There are elements of media satire, a vague suggestion that Alice is a viral sensation, a critique of the self-help mentality a la “The Secret”, and a romantic subplot, but none of these go anywhere particularly enlightening. The packed supporting cast, likewise, suggests more richness than we end up getting, with the likes of Linda Cardellini, Alan Tudyk, Tim Robbins, James Mardsen, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Joan Cusack and Wes Bentley as the guy in the pith helmet, all relegated to the sidelines, racking up assists so Wiig can score all the points (Cusack wins supporting MVP by virtue of having the most impressive reaction shot game)
Even if Piven’s film doesn’t accomplish much more than providing a canvas for Wiig to explore this character, Alice is a fascinating enough creation to justify a viewing. What significance Welcome to Me does finds is contained in Wiig’s performance and the way she makes Alice feel less nutty the more time we spend with her. What is her show but an exaggerated version of the social media life we all cultivate, where we carefully display our mundane daily struggles in the most dramatic possible light? B-
Welcome to Me is currently in select theaters, expands tomorrow and will be available on DVD and BluRay on June 16th.
Reader Comments (2)
This pretty much sums up exactly my feelings on this. Very well-written. I'll watch Wiig in almost anything but I hope she finds better projects for herself. This was fine, Skeleton Twins was good, Girl Most Likely was not. That's not a great post-Bridesmaid track record.
She's got a winner right around the corner with Diary of a Teenage Girl