Review of Welcome to Me (2015) by Tim B — 09 Aug 2015

What if one of Kristin Wig's many hilarious SNL sketch characters were an actual person in the real world? Welcome to Me comes close to answering this question casting Kristin Wig as the central character, Alice Kleig, who suffers from Borderline Personality Disorder. We're used to seeing Kristin Wig hamming it up as numerous variations of a crazy lady on SNL so when we see her playing a real woman with mental illness it's hard to know how to react at first.

Alice wins the lottery and feels empowered to stop taking her meds and live out her dream of star in her own Oprah-inspired TV show centered entirely about herself. The premise is comedic so it sounds like a comedy right? Yeah, but not really. All of the events play out humorously just as you'd expect them to, including a predictable narrative arc, but they're not playing for laughs.

We watch helplessly as a mentally ill person with newfound wealth makes disastrous choices that mirror the narcissistic selfie age we live in. Wig gives a consistently strong performance but the tone of the movie tells us we shouldn't be taking any of this all too seriously and some of the supporting characters are so thin or never fleshed out they might as well be in a sketch comedy. We're left in the lurch. By turn we squirm, cringe, smile, drop our jaws, and generally feel sad about the way Alice's condition afflicts her and those around her. We waver between knowing that we shouldn't laugh at Alice while feeling prompted to laugh at her behavior. This all boils down to a relatively interesting, somewhat forgettable, light-weight dramedy that could have been much more.