Film review: Welcome to Me review

Kristen Wiig. Rich Fury / Invision / AP

Welcome to Me

Director: Shira Piven

Starring: Kristen Wiig, James Marsden, Tim Robbins

Four and a half stars

Shira Piven’s offbeat black comedy introduces us to the world of Alice Kleig, a former veterinary nurse with ­mental-health problems. She regularly stops taking the drugs she is prescribed in favour of self-medicating through fad diets, idolises Oprah Winfrey and hasn’t turned her TV off for 11 years.

She has also just won US$86million (Dh315.8m) on the California state lottery. A narcissist with millions of dollars in her bank account, Alice gets annoyed when she is cut off during her cheque-­acceptance speech by the local TV news, approaches the owner of a struggling TV ­shopping channel (James Marsden), and writes a cheque for $15m for the production of 100 two-hour episodes of her very own chat show, Welcome to Me.

It'll be like Oprah, she explains, with two big differences – she will dispense with guests, and all the talking will be exclusively about her. We're treated to silent segments of Alice preparing and eating her high-­protein recipes, bizarre reenactments of traumatic moments from her early years, with local actors hired to play Alice and her family, friends and enemies, and other ­increasingly wierd segments as Alice's grip on reality ­becomes ever looser.

All this plus the “swan boat” in which Alice rides onto the stage every episode like a Disney princess. As Alice’s star rises – through a growing audience and even a PhD student studying the (unintentional) post-modern significance of the show – her mental state suffers. The on-air attacks on those she perceives as having done her wrong become more fierce and legally problematic, her lack of empathy more pronounced and her relationships with friends and colleagues more strained.

The film offers plenty of laugh-out-loud moments to balance the darker side, but manages to stay just the right side of not being disrespectful to Alice and others who suffer from mental-health problems.

Wiig delivers a standout performance that manages to make Alice at once interesting, humorous, irritating and infuriating, but always successfully stops just short of making her an object of ridicule.

Alice’s sheer quirkiness, as well as Wiig’s performance ensure the movie is far more than just another reality TV spoof. Alice is very much a willing participant in her own televised downfall. As such, as James Marsden has himself noted, it offers a lesson to today’s legions of Instagrammers and Facebookers who think the rest of the world has nothing better to think about than what they had for dinner – and plentiful laughs at the same time.

Welcome to Me director Shira Piven: challenges of balancing humour with a respectful portrayal of mental illness on the big screen

“It’s interesting because Kristen [Wiig, who plays lead character Alice, who has mental-health issues] and I, independently of each other, were really on the same page about how to approach the character of Alice.

“There were other people who had read the script earlier on and there were red flags if they felt it was too much of a comedy or a sketch. For me, they weren’t really understanding it. For me, the comedy comes from the humanity of the character and the fact they do these odd, yet totally recognisable, strange things.

“She’s a human being first, and Kristen and all the cast were very much on board with that – that we were never making fun of this character, that she had to be like someone we know or who is our friend.

“So many people would come up to me after the film and say, ‘Oh, that reminded me of this person in my life.’ There’s something about her behaviour that is totally recognisable and I give full credit to [writer] Eliot Laurence for that. He captured something very true about that kind of human behaviour and it was very important to me to never ever make fun of the character.

“That’s challenging, to create this character that’s funny but without making fun of them.”