Kristen Wiig (Alchemy)
A young fan of Alice Krieg’s talk show gives her a present: a book of work by Cindy Sherman. Alice doesn’t get it: “Wasn’t she on Laverne and Shirley?” Welcome to Me plays with the themes of female identity that make Sherman a multi-millionaire, but Alice doesn’t have any of Sherman’s art-world self-consciousness, and this earnestness almost approximates the psychologically damaged outsider art that inspires it.
Kristen Wiig stars as Alice Klieg, who lives in a cramped Southern California apartment stuffed with VHS tapes of Oprah that Alice has played so much that she can talk along with her favorite shows. Alice suffers from Borderline Personality Disorder, which means that she’s a volatile, impulsive person with sexual compulsions likely to freak out over the most insignificant personal slight. Naturally, she wins an $86 million dollar lottery jackpot, and true to her characteristic impulsiveness and inability to make reasoned decisions, she buys her own talk show on an infomercial channel.
In Werner Herzog’s documentary Grizzly Man, footage of nature-lover Timothy Treadwell ranting alone in the wilderness came off like the kind of show a precocious child might put on in the privacy of their bedroom. Welcome to Me conveys that childhood mania in the form of a comedy-drama, part Grizzly Man, part King of Comedy.
Alice doesn’t have guests on her two-hour talk show but talks about herself, occasionally mispronouncing words like “carbohydrants” and hiring reenactors to stage traumatic events in her life with segment titles like, “Somebody’s Been Tampering with My Handbag!” Welcome to Me plays out as if the semi-coherent ramblings of a mentally ill person on the bus or the graphomaniacal writings you might see posted on a coffee shop bulletin board were put in movie form.
The movie isn’t about having dreams or nightmares about being in the spotlight; it’s about being so self-absorbed you’re blind to anyone else around you. Alice isn’t good at relationships, whether it’s with cable host Gabe (Web Bentley), her shrink Dr. Moffet (Tom Robbins) or her best friend Gina (Linda Cardellini); when Gina tells Alice she’s lost her job, Alice is too wrapped up in her own world to give her any emotional support.
It doesn’t quite work. This small movie has too many big movie beats—like uncomfortable romantic entanglements and regular visits with her shrink—but the end credits run with a song that suggests a different kind of movie. An earnest crooner sings, “You better turn your ESP switch on…don’t you think you should so something about those funny smiles?”
Michael Farnati’s “ESP Switch” was originally released in a limited edition of 500, the kind of highly personal, idiosyncratic album that collectors of private press LPs dream of. (Read my series in Washington’s Homemade Records to hear what area musicians have released over the years, though I haven’t found any this strange—yet). Farneti’s music had, as they say in the business, no commercial potential. But while a private press album can be made for a relatively small budget, even a modest film like Welcome to Me needed a significant budget and recognizable actors to get made.
Kristen Wiig turns in a strong performance that gets at the comedy and tragedy of Alice, but the material seems to call for a kind of found-footage comedy that uncovers some anonymous DIY project never meant for commercial consumption. I liked the movie, despite its problems, and give director Shira Piven props for not making a standard SNL-alum comedy. If only Alice Krieg had directed it herself.
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Welcome to Me
Directed by Shira Piven
Written by Eliot Laurence
With Kristen Wiig, Wes Bentley, Linda Cardellini, Jennifer Jason Leigh, James Marsden, Tim Robbins
Rated R for sexual content, some graphic nudity, language and brief drug use
Running time 105 minutes
Opens today at Angelika Pop-Up
