6/10

Director Shira Piven’s first mainstream directing effort is a look into the world of a mentally ill woman who learns that money isn’t everything in ‘Welcome To Me’. Alice Kleig (Kristen Wiig) is a 30-something year old woman with Borderline Personality Disorder. Her dreams of a fantasy lifestyle come true when she wins the biggest lottery in the state’s history. She quits her psychiatric medications and buys her own talk show. Inspired by her idol, Oprah, she broadcasts her dirty laundry as both a form of exhibitionism and a platform to share her peculiar views on everything from nutrition to relationships to neutering pets. ‘Welcome To Me’ is a film that has light touches of genius, mostly in the form of an honest performance from Wiig. In this film, she finally gets a starring role and cashes in on the dramatic range she teased us with in 2014’s ‘The Skeleton Twins’. While Wiig doesn’t have the most entertaining of scripts to work with, she fills in the gaps with awareness on a crippling disease that i wasn’t very informed of. She manages to succeed in making this film a comedy while not forcing the audience to laugh at her character. It’s endearing, honest, and even frightening when it comes to how unaware Alice comes across when she lashes out. The film is the most uncomfortable i have felt in a film this year, and that could be a good or a bad thing. While it doesn’t do much to help the progression of the entertainment value, it does create some challenging obstacles for Alice, as she must overcome herself to taste a side of life that has been bottled until her fortune comes to fruition. The film has a solid supporting cast led by Linda Cardellini as Alice’s best friend, Tim Robbins as her therapist, and television studio workers including Joan Cusack, Wes Bentley, and a money driven producer played by James Marsden. All of them are given notable time in the script to play these shining examples in Alice’s life. Not much chemistry can be developed in a script with as many interruptions as a result of the disease Alice suffers, but the film works best when it tries to communicate people’s reactions to her puzzling actions on live television. The film isn’t nearly long enough (One hour and twenty four minutes) or brave enough to showcase the mental illness to the same effect that ‘Still Alice’ did. It does educate us slightly, but it plays off the quirkiness of the disease, which sometimes feels uneven with the kind of performance Wiig is trying to convey. People will wonder how a woman with a mental disease could be given her own TV show, but i fully believed in the premise due to the fact that money can get you anything in a cash and carry world. What the film says about our society is that we don’t care what we put on TV or who it hurts as long as green is always represented. ‘Welcome To Me’ is a welcome invitation to a Kristen Wiig coming out party. With a more informative script, the film could’ve been an Oscar contender.