Generally, when an actor portrays someone with mental health issues, it’s accepted as Oscar bait. The actor is trying to win Best Actor. They’re often not actually the best actor that year, but they’ve left their comfort zone, which is often enough to garner at least a nomination. Julianne Moore won this year for playing someone with early onset Alzheimer’s in Still Alice. Sean Penn was nominated in 2001 for I Am Sam. Penn’s Sam, the titular character, is a “mentally handicapped man,” according to the Internet Movie Database’s synopsis.
This is what’s so surprising and amazing and refreshing about Kristen Wiig in Welcome to Me. Wiig plays Alice Kleig, a woman suffering from borderline personality disorder, who wins $86 million in the lottery, stops taking her medication, and spends $15 million of her winnings to start her own talk show with a production company that specializes in 90s-style infomercials, the title of which is also the title of the movie.
Wiig will not win an Oscar for Welcome to Me. It’s too small a film, making the rounds at festivals — it premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival LAST September — and not really winning anything, other than attention and praise for Wiig. It was just wide-released in the United States on May 1.
It is the definition of a dark comedy, pulling laughs out of subject matter usually considered too taboo to laugh at. It works because of the lottery conceit. Instead of making us laugh at Alice Kleig’s illness, the film shows how her money gives her extreme agency. She spends her way into having her own talk show, where she works out her deep emotional and psychological issues live on TV.
In the initial meeting with the network, when she pitches her own show, the network chief, played by James Marsden, asks if she’s thinking about a half-hour, she responds by saying, “No, two hours.” And then she requests to enter the set on a swan boat. “Hello, I’m Alice Kleig,” she says at the beginning of every episode, “and Welcome to Me.” Segments on the show include cooking demonstrations, showing viewers how to regulate their moods through a high-protein, low-carb diet (Alice cooks a meatloaf cake and proceeds to eat it, live on television, for five full minutes); lessons like “Matching Colors to Emotions,” which sounds as insane as it looks; and reenactments of the worst moments of her life, played by inept actors, which she often interrupts (“Fuck you to death, Jordana!” She screams, in all seriousness, at the actress playing her worst enemy from childhood).
She buys the understanding of the rest of the cast, and we, the audience, are bought right along with them.
The whole thing only works because Wiig can pull it off. Her signature deadpan, brought to the fore by roles like Bridesmaids, is the engine that makes the whole thing go. You never forget that you’re watching Kristen Wiig play Alice Kleig, but that doesn’t matter.
What matters is that Wiig’s Alice exists completely and holistically in this film’s tidy little world. She is the mess, and she uses that interplay to amazing effects. The mental illness doesn’t read as pandering to the Academy because it works and is wholly believable. Wiig won’t win a statue, but who cares? Alice Kleig definitely doesn’t.