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June 10, 2015
Review: Welcome to Me

welcome to meIn Welcome to Me, director Shira Piven, writer Eliot Laurence, and star Kristen Wiig delve into the strange underbelly of our media landscape, exploring the intoxicating blend of exploitation, exhibitionism, and emotional neediness that power the machine of reality and talk television. Living with borderline personality disorder in an apartment stuffed with swan figurines, copious VHS tapes of Oprah episodes and a TV that hasn’t been turned off in 11 years, Alice Klieg (Kristen Wiig) has plenty of time for introspection. Alice is lucky to have a circle of supporters, including her best friend (Linda Cardellini) and her gay ex-husband (Alan Tudyk), but it’s television, especially Oprah, that she spends the most time with and provides the most emotionally stabilizing force in her life; she watches the tapes over and over, the cadences internalized, repeating their homilies with a spiritual conviction. So it’s only natural that when she wins 86 million dollars in the lottery that she’s immediately compelled to go to a local access TV station and spend fifteen million on her own talk show, specializing in her.

Alice’s show, “Welcome to Me," is a phantasmagoria of low-budget television, where recognizable formats are repurposed to promote the stunningly weird contents of Alice’s imagination; a cooking segment shows how to make a cake from hamburger meat, a telethon shows the on-air neutering of dogs, and an endlessly bewildered cast re-enacts moments of formative trauma in Alice’s childhood. Now off her meds and living in a reservation casino, Alice’s escalating behavior worries everyone from her therapist (Tim Robbins), to the station’s financially desperate producers (James Marsden, Joan Cusack, Wes Bentley), but Alice’s money and the show’s growing popularity insulate her from criticism, until she must choose between her show and her personal well-being.

Welcome to Me strikes a delicate balance; it’s a hilarious media satire, but it never hesitates to remind the audience of Alice’s fragile mental state. It calls attention to the various ways that certain kinds of television can enable and exploit the mentally ill, but it’s clearly made by people who fundamentally love TV. Wiig gives her best performance to date, a powerfully raw portrait of a woman who’s always defiantly herself, despite never being in on the joke. In the end, this isn’t a film “about” mental illness; rather, an unfiltered, borderline protagonist provides the best lens to show the infinite depths of ego and narcissism that television both cultivates (in consumers) and harvests (in talent). A quick look at current reality TV (not to mention Youtube) proves that Alice’s fame is unnervingly possible. It’s not that Alice’s desires (for fame, for endless self-absorption) are that out of step with society, it’s only that she grasps at those desires with a total disregard for decorum and fitting into expected roles. Even when desperately hurt, Alice is so startlingly honest that viewers can’t help but laugh (exemplified best in the show’s musically upbeat but lyrically dark theme song, sung by Alice of course). Welcome to Me is an insightful and inspired film on modern media and its mindsets that just happens to be the funniest of the year so far.

Welcome to Me will be available on DVD on 06/16.

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Written by: Joe Blessing
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