by Victor Pryor
Has any successful comedian in the history of film shifted towards ‘take me seriously’ drama with the velocity that Kirsten Wiig did?
Almost immediately after her blockbuster success with Bridesmaids, Wiig made a hard left into the sorts of indie dramas usually reserved for up-and-comers, not newly minted superstars.
In a way, this is an understandable move: after seven years going very big on Saturday Night Live, it’s a natural reaction to do something more subtle and nuanced. But for whatever reason, Wiig interpreted ‘subtle’ and ‘nuanced’ as ‘somber’ and ‘narcotized.’ She let the light go out of her eyes, and it turned out there wasn’t much left.
Not surprisingly, this strategy had been a bit of a mixed bag, both creatively and career-wise. For all her attempts at dramatic stretching, her best dramatic performance remains the one that made her a household name.
Welcome To Me is a more than acceptable compromise between her comedic chops and her stabs at seriousness, finding a workable balance between her manic frenzy and her preference for dead-eyed underplaying. What results is her best performance so far and an unexpectedly affecting melancomedy.
(That’s a portmanteau I just made up for ‘melancholy comedy.’ You can use it for free if you want…)
The story is just absurd enough to be plausible: a borderline personality/Oprah obsessive named Alice Klieg (Wiig) wins $86,000,000 in the lottery and funnels it into her dream of hosting a talk show.
As always, there is a very different version of this movie that could have happened, one that is very broad and goofy. And it’s to the films credit that this is not that. It’s certainly funny bordering on hilarious. But at the same time, there’s an undercurrent of rootless despair here: Alice isn’t wacky; she’s damaged.
Taken as satire, it’s an indictment of our society’s increasing tendency towards toxic solipsism, and our belief that our lives are so interesting we must share them with the world. And the idea that the show becomes a minor hit plays to this aspect (thankfully, they keep this part scaled to a level that feels plausible enough in the age of YouTube). But as filtered through the persona and mental illness of Alice, it becomes a slow motion train wreck and a cry for help that nobody’s willing to answer.
There are many uncomfortable moments when Alice’s ever-tenuous grip on reality slips, and they’re not played for laughs. They’re startling and intense and deeply, deeply sad. As they should, the laughs come not at her expense, but at the expense of the people around her, who struggle to cater to her ever shifting needs and weather her mood swings and omnipresent discomforting sexuality.
But there’s a generosity at the heart of Welcome To Me, which manifests in the basic idea that everyone is at least a little screwed up.
Wiig is supported by a frankly amazing cast here. The standout is Tim Robbins as Alice’s endlessly patient therapist, showing a gentleness and compassion he rarely calls upon, but there are also sterling turns from James Marsden and Wes Bentley as the brothers who co-own the low-rent cable channel that profits from Wiig’s instability; Alan Tudyk as her gay ex-husband; and a typically hilarious Joan Cusack as the producer who somehow becomes a mother figure to Alice. The only person who doesn’t get anything to do is Jennifer Jason Leigh, utterly wasted as the one person at the station unwilling to indulge Alice’s antics.
But the ultimate arc of the story pivots around Linda Cardellini’s Gina, who struggles to be supportive of a person who is unable to see past themselves and their own dramas. Their friendship, though roughly sketched, feels real enough that their inevitable break-up and reconciliation feels both inevitable and earned.
As with real life mental illness, there are no endings here, only a moment of lucidity that might go away at any moment. It’s not the triumphant conclusion one might hope for, but it’s true to the deeply human core that writer Eliot Laurence and director Shiva Piven have established here. Welcome To Me may not be the goofy comedy the plot summary makes it sound like, but it’s a better, stranger film than I expected.
SPECIAL FEATURE: Behind-The-Scenes featurette
