Title – Welcome to Me (2014)

Director – Shira Piven (Fully Loaded)

Cast – Kristen Wiig, Wes Bentley, Linda Cardellini, Joan Cusack, Tim Robbins, James Marsden, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Alan Tudyk

Plot – After winning over 80 million dollars in the lottery, mentally unstable Alice Klieg (Wiig) sets up shop in a local casino then decides to fund her own TV show, about her and starring her.

“Come with me. Into another time that happened to me”

Review by Eddie on 4/12/2015

One of the more downright bizarre films you’re likely to watch this year, this latest effort from the producing pair of Will Ferrell and Adam Mackay sees one of everyone’s favourite female comedy leads Kristin Wiig as an even more demented version of King of Comedy’s Rupert Pupkin to indifferent results that makes Welcome to Me a controlled train wreck that you can’t help but watch.

One of those comedy films where you almost feel too awkward or bad to even laugh, Welcome try’s to walk the fine line between comedy and dramatics and when dealing with the anything but funny issue of mental illness (in which Wiig’s Alice Klieg certainly suffers from) it’s tough for a film to balance all the elements to combine a cohesive whole. While films like the aforementioned King of Comedy certainly did it and little scene films like Observe and Report straddled the line well, Welcome can’t seem to bring the goods to the table needed to make both the antics of Alice’s hilarious (live TV animal neutering anyone?) or her serious issues something we can care for, despite the best intentioned efforts of the daring and baring Wiig.

We all know of Wiig’s talents in the comedy field and with last year’s Skeleton Twins in particular showcasing Wiig’s chops in more serious pictures, it’s good to see her once more try something outside the box. Wiig is arguably the films greatest asset and while things come and go on screen in a flurry of random developments, Alice’s adventure as a lottery winner and makeshift TV show presenter is a site to behold sometimes for the right reasons and more often for the wrong reasons but its Wiig’s commitment to the cause that makes us stick by and watch and while we never really get an understanding for Alice’s true identity, Wiig certainly deserves a pat on the back.

Without a second of a doubt too weird to connect to many more than a handful of viewers, Welcome to Me is a strange exercise exploring mental illness in the comedic medium that could’ve quite easily become something special on the back of Wiig’s performance but ends up being a disappointingly unengaging journey to the deepest recesses of the bizarreness of the human condition and our ever thirsty want to feel relevant.

2 recorded Oprah shows out of 5