Kristen Wiig in Welcome to Me (Alchemy)
There’s something to be said for originality, which this Kristen Wiig vehicle has in spades. The plot is conventional enough: a narcissist learns over three acts to become slightly less self-centered. It’s the protagonist, Alice Klieg (Wiig), who is utterly unique. Diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, she’s a comic car wreck of a creation, so full of unpredictability that looking away is impossible.
She also has us at hello. The opening minutes are fascinating, starting with a pan over her cluttered apartment. A freestanding hand sanitizer dispenser is among the more conspicuous elements, and everything is arranged by color because, we find out, color helps Alice contain her emotions. Then she appears, pushing a VHS tape into a VCR, watching, and mimicking an old episode of Oprah about finding one’s calling.
Not coincidentally, Oprah is Alice’s calling. When she wins the lottery of $86 million, Alice burns through the money to fund her own cable TV show. When she pitches it to a room full of infomercial makers (Wes Bentley, Joan Cusack, James Marsen, and Jennifer Jason Leigh), it comes off sounding a bit like Seinfeld: a talk show about nothing. No guests, no topics, just a woman exploring and explaining herself for two hours straight. The show quickly turns into weird (and sometime beautiful) performance art. In one recurring segment, Alice supervises reenacted moments of her life in an attempt to exorcise certain demons.
This usually does not go smoothly, highlighting, unfortunately, Welcome to Me’s major problem, which is that it’s a comedy about a woman with mental illness. That might have been manageable if screenwriter Eliot Laurence had been content to focus on Alice’s personality disorder. As Good As It Gets serves as an example of a generally well-regarded portrayal of obsessive compulsive disorder, for instance. But Laurence turns Alice into an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink kind of wacko. Her non sequiturs and lack of social cue awareness make her look less like someone who has gone off medication and more like she was raised by a pack of autistic wolves. She can’t even pronounce some basic words correctly for no other seeming reason than it being a source of humor.
The fact that Alice gives a jokey description of previously having IBS (Irritable Bowel Syndrome) makes it clear that the filmmakers are not above laughing at illness. It’s a tone deaf moment in a screenplay that at its best recalls some of Charlie Kaufman’s more inventive work, the absurdity of Being John Malkovich or Synecdoche, New York. But the moment is telling. “Not everyone’s an emotional exhibitionist,” chides Alice’s mother (Joyce Hiller Piven), when asked why she doesn’t want to be on her daughter’s TV show. She may as well be chastising the movie’s cast and crew, who aren’t doing much more than putting a crazy girl on display.
It’s a shame that this cloud hangs over the film, which does at least have something interesting to say about the line between life and the representation of it. “No, this is not the show!” Marsden’s character yells when the audience applauds after he has a fight with Alice, even though, unbeknownst to him, it is. Everything in her life is the show.
When Alice’s best friend, Gina (Linda Cardellini), who puts up with her for reasons that are never made clear, finally turns her back on Alice, it serves as a wake-up call, like bad Nielsen ratings. In response, Alice sets out to fulfill a new dream: repairing some of the damage she’s left in her wake. Welcome to Me indulges us in the idea that we are the center of the universe. Then, over the course of 100 minutes, it gently corrects the notion, though it ends up scoring a point for selflessness.
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