Shira Piven's Welcome To Me tells the story of Alice Klieg, a young woman suffering from Borderline Personality Disorder, who lives a secluded lifestyle in front of the television, obsessing over her idol, Oprah Winfrey. When Alice learns that she has won the lottery, she stops taking her medication and seeing her psychiatrist, using her newfound fortune to buy her own talk show on network television. Inspired by her idol, Alice uses her talk show as a platform to share her distinctive viewpoint, including some intimate details about her life, family, and friends which inadvertently leads to feelings being hurt. Shira Piven's Welcome to Me is a uncomfortable, dark comedy that relies heavily on Kristen Wig's performance, unfortunately falling short of delivering a thoughtful examination of mental illness. Wig does a fantastic job making Alice an endearing character, being a troubled individual who is extremely funny, while being simultaneously heartbreaking and even terrifying at times. There is an off-kilter aspect to Wig's performance that certainly adds dimension and depth to a narrative that simply lacks in-depth insight into mental illness, as the film around her simply lets her down, being too uneven to fully succeed. That being said, Welcome To Me thrives as a comedy behind Wig's off-kilter performance, also having a nice incendiary undercurrent centered around greed, as the studio bends over backwards to supply Wig with whatever she needs regardless of how offensive it is, due to her large cash flow. Films about mental illness are very hard to execute properly, and while Welcome To Me succeeds at stretches due to Wig's transfixing performance, the film falters during most of its more dramatic moments, being at its best when it's simply an outlandish comedy.
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AuthorLove of all things cinema brought me here. Archives
June 2023
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