It's a bit depressing.
Welcome to Me
Grade: C+
Director: Shira Piven (Fully Loaded)
Screenplay: Eliot Laurence
Cast: Kristen Wiig (Bridesmaids), James Marsden (X Men)
Rating: R
Runtime: 105 min.
by John DeSando
If Welcome to Me is a comedy, then it’s a very dark one. Alice Kleig (Kristen Wiig) has Borderline Personality Disorder that manifests itself in ways like eating a meatloaf cake with sweet-potato icing on TV and walking nude through a casino.
After winning the lottery, she buys a TV talk show and proceeds to talk the whole boring time about herself (no surprise as the title of her show is the title of the film and leaves no room for doubt that it’s all about her). She strangely advises the audience, "You can have what I have if you really believe in it." She asks a stranger on the street if there was “a rape in A Tale of Two Cities." She’s not even goofy, just much past the borderline of normalcy with few laughs.
To be fair, she’s attempting to find out, as we all should, who she is, and therefore using the therapy of a talk show to expunge her demons and discover “me.” It just doesn’t make for good comedy—bizarre yes, funny no.
Although I find little humor in her BPD, at least in the dreary way director Shira Piven and writer Eliot Laurence present it, I was hoping for some broadcast humor such as Will Ferrell and Adam McKay gave in Anchorman or the insightful satire in Broadcast News and Network. Her talking on TV about masturbating and actually neutering animals in front of the camera were off the mark and weird without being witty.
It’s fun, however, to see Tim Robbins as Alice’s therapist and too little of Jennifer Jason Leigh as a TV staffer. Joan Cusack in the control room expertly expresses my disbelief in Alice’s shenanigans, and like me, she finds it dreary without being funny.
I have to hand it to the filmmakers, however: I have a very good idea about Borderline Personality Disorder. In a summer chockfull of blockbusters, this small film looms larger than it ought.
John DeSando, a Los Angeles Press Club first-place winner for National Entertainment Journalism, hosts WCBE’s It’s Movie Time and co-hosts Cinema Classics. Contact him at JDeSando@Columbus.rr.com
