Welcome to Me

Kristin Wiig delivers a fiercely honest performance in Shira Piven's mordant comedy, a penetrating but unsettling portrait of a woman with borderline personality disorder who achieves notoriety by indulging in her obsession with celebrity culture. When semi-recluse Alice Klieg (Wiig)—who spends most of her time watching tapes of self-improvement infomercials—wins the lottery, she uses the windfall to purchase airtime for a self-aggrandizing TV talk show in which she settles old scores with those she believes have wronged her, via high-pitched recreations of traumatic episodes in her life, punctuated by blissfully weird cooking segments and even odder interludes that find her discoursing with shocking explicitness on her medical condition. The TV show attracts a cult following (presumably of viewers awaiting her inevitable onscreen meltdown), but as her antics escalate—she takes to neutering dogs live on air—legal as well as personal problems arise. Wiig is at her deadpan best here, conveying Alice's unnerving singlemindedness with a frightening intensity that captures the reality of mental illness and then invites us to laugh at it. But this is also what makes Welcome to Me an uncomfortable watch: using the story of a psychologically unbalanced person as a means of attacking our contemporary fascination with fame is an ethically debatable proposition. Still, this should be considered a strong optional purchase. [Note: DVD/Blu-ray extras include a behind-the-scenes featurette (8 min.), and trailers. Bottom line: a small extras package for an uneven film featuring an impressive performance by Kristen Wiig.] (F. Swietek)