At first, Welcome To Me appears to be set sometime in the ’80s, since Wiig’s character, Alice Klieg, has an apartment filled with VHS cassettes on which she’s recorded infomercials and Oprah episodes. It’s actually the present day, though, and a visit Alice makes to her therapist (Tim Robbins) reveals that she has borderline personality disorder, symptoms of which include “intense or uncontrollable emotional triggers” and “self-damaging behavior.” Impulsivity, another symptom, rears its ugly head when Alice, who has stopped taking her medication, wins $86 million in the California state lottery. After watching a modern-day infomercial featuring two business-owning brothers, Gabe (Wes Bentley) and Rich (James Marsden), she approaches them with a proposal. She wants to host her own talk show, Welcome To Me, with segments devoted to cooking, telling random anecdotes, re-enacting childhood traumas, and castrating dogs on-air (seriously). The company’s producers (Joan Cusack and Jennifer Jason Leigh) object, but the cash-strapped brothers accept Alice’s $15-million check and let her do whatever she wants.
Penned by first-time screenwriter Eliot Laurence and directed by Shira Piven (sister of Jeremy), Welcome To Me can’t quite figure out what to do with this ludicrous premise. Elements of it echo Network, the 1976 classic in which a news anchor retains his job after he clearly loses his mind, because he’s boosting ratings. This film is fundamentally realistic, though, and doesn’t pretend that the American viewing public would get excited about what’s basically a public-access show hosted by someone with a mental illness. At the same time, nobody involved wants to appear as if they’re making fun of mental illness, so Alice’s eccentricities, and Wiig’s performance, are amusing only in a desperately sad sort of way. (When Alice gets stark naked in public, it’s her low point—not even vaguely as uproarious as when, say, a Will Ferrell character gets stark naked in public.) In the end, Welcome To Me chickens out, devoting its warm-and-fuzzy finale to Alice’s belated realization that she’s been mean to her longtime best friend, Gina (Linda Cardellini). Wiig can still weird it up with the best of ’em, but nobody wants to see Virgania Horsen struggle to experience personal growth.
