At the end of her now-legendary Tonight Show interview as Daenerys Targaryen, it is revealed Kristen Wiig is there to promote Welcome to Me, pitched as “woman wins the lottery and uses it to finance her own daytime talk show.” I interpreted this as “Joan Calamezzo: The Movie” and immediately added it to my to-watch list. What that quick summary fails to mention is that Kristen Wiig’s character Alice Klieg has borderline personality disorder, and that her decision to produce her talk show coincides with her going off her meds. Yes, Welcome to Me is in the perilous genre of the mental illness comedy. Is it the Silver Linings Playbook for borderline personality disorder or another Blue Jasmine offering a vague Blanche DuBois-esque mélange of symptoms in lieu of actual characterization? Welcome to Me falls somewhere in the middle of that spectrum.
On her show, Alice describes her history of mental health diagnoses: manic depression, rapid-cycling bipolar disorder, and most recently, borderline personality disorder. As a mentally ill person myself, I nodded my head along to the ever-changing labels psych patients keep up with. But borderline personality disorder is outside my personal mental health history, and I know very little about it. I don’t even “know” anything about it from Hollywood; the only other borderline character I could think of was Winona Ryder in Girl, Interrupted, and that film strongly challenges the appropriateness of that diagnosis. So I cannot tell you if Welcome to Me “gets borderline personality disorder right” (but here are some articles that address that question, each with different conclusions).
Whether or not Alice is a fair representation of borderline personality diorder, she is a clearly realized character. Wiig plays her with a flat affect most of the time, somewhat interpersonally detached and awkward, and either unaware or uninterested in social decorum (her “prepared statement” after her lottery win begins, “I was a summer baby born in 1971 in Simi Valley, California, and I’ve been using masturbation as a sedative since 1991”). But Alice’s emotions are easily and erratically triggered in ways that leave deep wounds, evidenced by her talk show segments re-enacting small slights from her past, like a friend swiping some of her makeup. Alice’s personal take on her condition becomes clear when she reflects on “all the times in my life when I was supposed to feel something but I felt nothing, and all the other times in my life where I wasn’t supposed to feel anything but I felt too much and the people around me weren’t really ready for all of my feelings.”
While the writing and acting create a consistent vision of Alice, it is one wholly defined by her mental illness. She’s not a person, she’s a DSM-V checklist. So it is impossible to relate to her character, even as a mentally ill person myself.
And it becomes very hard to watch Welcome to Me as a comedy because laughing at Alice feels cruel. She is taken advantage of by the small-town tv station that airs her show, who keep telling her they need more money because she’ll robotically write them checks until she’s spent nearly all her fortune. Her therapist (Tim Robbins) is condescending and callous. And when people ARE kind to Alice (like her best friend Gina [Linda Cardellini] and her co-worker and occasional lover Gabe [Wes Bentley]), we see her hurt them terribly through her own self-involvement and volatility. It is a very sad story. The absurdity of the talk show in the center stops being funny and becomes tragic. And not being able to laugh at Kristen Wiig riding a “swan boat” onto stage while she sings her own theme song is just a waste.
Welcome to Me offers the ingredients of a good drama about mental illness and a good comedy about a low-budget vanity talk show, but combined this comes out like the meatloaf “cake” with sweet potato “frosting” that Alice presents on her show. It’s unpleasant and you wonder why anyone would make it in the first place.
Robin Hitchcock is a writer based in Pittsburgh. If she had her own TV show, she would hire a professional to sing the theme song.