Sub-Cult 2.0 #11 Welcome To Me (2014)
Welcome, friends, to the very first entry in TV in Movies Month here at Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place. I wasn’t quite sure which theme month to pick for July. Wrestlemania and Direct-to-DVD sequels were both in the mix but if everything works out, July will see the publication of the Ridiculously Self-Indulgent, Ill-Advised Vanity edition of The Weird Accordion to Al and one of its big attractions is a lengthy new chapter on UHF, one of the all-time great movies about television. So it seemed thematically appropriate to devote July to other big screen descriptions of the small screen.
Besides, the Ridiculously Self-Indulgent, Ill-Advised Vanity edition doesn’t just deal with TV in the portion devoted to UHF. I also write extensively about Al’s songs about television, and The Compleat Al, the long-form video he made for Showtime featuring clips from his Al-TV MTV specials, and every episode of The Weird Al Show and the fifth season of Comedy Bang! Bang!, television shows about shows-within-shows and television as a medium.
I’ve got television on the brain these days and one movie that has been rattling around in my cerebellum ever since I caught it on Netflix a few years back is the 2014 comedy-psychodrama Welcome to Me, which takes star/producer Kristin Wiig’s genius for comic awkwardness to exhilaratingly dark and uncomfortable extremes. It’s one of those weird little movies that sticks with you, that gets under your skin and floats into your consciousness with surprising regularity.
If you do not enjoy the comedy of discomfort then Welcome to You will be absolute torture because it is 87 minutes of Kristin Wiig, our reigning queen of clammy self-consciousness, making everyone around her anxious and uncomfortable through increasingly extreme behavior.
Welcome to Me is essentially a weird 1974 New Hollywood character study released forty years too late. But even in the more experimental and adventurous days of New Hollywood a movie this prickly and peculiar would have a hard time finding even a cult following.
The kind of movie agents beg their clients not to do, Welcome to Me stars Kristin Wiig in the challenging role of Alice Klieg, a woman whose Borderline Personality Disorder renders her incapable of reading social cues or understanding tone or body language.
Alice is leading a small, sad life on the fringes of society. She’s an Oprah Winfrey-obsessed outsider out of step with the modern world before she wins tens of millions in the lottery and instantly attains a level of power and wealth she has no idea how to handle. In a matter of mere moments, Alice goes from being someone who might as well not exist as far as society is concerned, a mentally ill woman living on disability because her illness makes it impossible to hold down a job, to being someone who possesses what we value above all else besides youth and beauty: staggering wealth.
Alice leans all of the wrong lessons from Oprah’s example. The show business outsider decides that she doesn’t just want to follow in her hero’s footsteps by becoming a wealthy, strong, powerful and independent woman; she wants her own television show as well, and isn’t at all put off by her complete lack of relevant experience or talent.
So Alice use her new millions to buy her own talk show from a failing station that knows damn well that Alice has no business gracing even the airwaves of public access or the least discriminating UHF channel but isn’t about to say no to the millions upon millions of dollars to be made from indulging her delusions of grandeur.
So Rich (James Marsden) and Gabe (Wes Bentley) Ruskin, the brothers who own the station, make a Faustian bargain. They agree to produce one hundred episodes of Alice’s talk show, Welcome to Me, for fifteen million dollars and try not to think too hard about how the station’s future is dependent on exploiting and indulging the power fantasy of a mentally ill woman off her meds.
Alice wants her TV show to be a talk show just like Oprah. Yet she also seems intent on having the first talk show where the host doesn’t actually talk to guests or the studio audience. Instead of a conversation, Welcome to Me is an endless monologue from someone whose narcissism is so vast and all-encompassing that it threatens to blot out the sun.
When other human beings appear on the sad set of Welcome To Me they’re actors given the thankless task of re-enacting scenes from Alice’s distant past as a way of settling ancient scores with ex boyfriends and former friends and acquaintances and family members and anyone who ever did her wrong.
Welcome To Me is less a conventional television show than a flamboyant expression of its creator and host’s mental illness. Kristin Wiig dominates Welcome To Me so thoroughly that it can feel like a one woman show despite having an obscenely packed supporting cast. In addition to Wiig, Marsden and Bentley, Welcome To Me co-stars Tim Robbins as Alice’s psychiatrist, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Joan Cusack as members of Welcome To Me’s crew and Linda Cardinelli as Alice’s best friend Gina, Alan Tudyk as Alice’s endlessly supportive gay ex-husband and Loretta DeVine as a lawyer who sternly informs the mortified station owners of the steep financial and legal price they will have to pay for producing and broadcasting a show in which a woman in the grips of profound mental illness is continuously slandering random people in her life for various sins and transgressions they may or may not have committed.
Then again Wiig should dominate the proceedings as completely and inextricably as her character’s money and randomly acquired but very real power dominates the grubby, desperate world of the cut-rate station where the magic happens.
The crew-members of Welcome To Me almost never address, even indirectly, the surreal absurdity of the situation they find themselves in as grown professionals tasked with trying to transform a deeply unwell woman whose ability to make everyone around her agonizingly uncomfortable borders on preternatural into a low-budget Oprah Winfrey.
It’s as if they’re all in such a profound sense of denial about who they are and what they’ve allowed themselves to become that to acknowledge it would make everything unbearable, that it would push an exceedingly hard situation into the realm of impossible.
When it comes to conveying the internal torment and utter mortification of the crew, director Shira Piven of Evanston, Illinois’ famous Piven family, who is also the wife of producer Adam McKay, shows rather than tells. The exquisitely uncomfortable laughs come in no small part from the way the uniformly terrific cast uses their equally expressive bodies and faces to communicate what they cannot say out loud with words out of fear of losing the station’s cash cow. What the TV people roped into making Alice’s bizarre delusions a reality don’t say ends up being as important, if not more important, than what they do.
When it comes to show-business professionalism and mental stability, Alice makes Rupert Pupkin look as slick and professional as Dick Cavett by comparison. The titular television show in Welcome to Me is a brazen exercise in emotional exhibitionism and clammy voyeurism that reflects the cracked psyche of its creator and host all too vividly.
Alice’s show is irrefutable televised evidence that she is losing her battles with her formidable demons even before she makes a questionable decision to use it to broadcast animals being spayed and neutered on-air.
As long as Alice is preposterously rich, she is catered to and indulged. But as soon as the money is spent the dream disappears and she goes back to being the kind of reluctantly tolerated outsider people walk across the street to avoid.
Alice ends Welcome to Me with an uncharacteristic flurry of spiritual and emotional growth. After bottoming out and wandering naked through a casino Alice goes back on her medication. She gives almost all of what’s left of her lotto millions to her long-suffering best friend as a rather extravagant apology for taking her for granted for decades.
Alice winds down her show and, in a particularly hokey bit of symbolism, returns to her modest hovel of a home and finally turns off a television that has been on for over a decade, no longer a slave to its glowing light.
Gabe gives Alice a tiny little video camera as a tool for self-expression infinitely cheaper and less involved than the production of Welcome To Me. It’s a gesture that drags our deluded heroine kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century.
In the Youtube era, if someone mentally ill wants to communicate their thoughts and dreams and violent delusions to the world without a filter they don’t need to pay professionals millions of dollars to help them mount a proper television program; they just need to turn the camera on themselves and start talking.
For a movie that defies convention throughout, Welcome To Me’s ending can’t help but feel like a bit of a betrayal. Wiig is boldly, brazenly unlikable and unsympathetic throughout Welcome To Me. That’s a huge part of what makes the character and her performance so compelling. Yet it ends by taking dramatic, familiar steps to make her palatable to a mainstream audience that would probably never be interested in the movie no matter how many commercial concessions it makes.
Welcome To Me illustrates what I love about Wiig as a fearless comic and dramatic performer but it also helps explain why she’s never been as big a movie star as her breakthrough in Bridesmaids would suggest: she’s just too goddamn weird and also Ghostbusters should only ever be boys.
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