Kristen Wiig is most famous for her super weird characters
on Saturday Night Live and in movies
like MacGruber, but the indie
projects she picks are more on the serious side. Wiig's latest is the Toronto
Film Festival fave Welcome to Me, a
dark comedy about a woman who has some questionable ideas about how to spend
her lottery winnings.
Alice Klieg (Wiig) wants to be Oprah. Well, really, who
doesn't? More specifically, Alice wants to have her own talk show, but the
catch is that it's all about her. At first, it just seems like Alice is your
garden-variety kooky heroine, but we get the feeling from the trailer that
things quickly take a turn. The first hint is that Alice's shrink, played
by Tim Robbins, mentions she's stopped taking her meds and is living in a casino with all her cash.
As per the movie's
description, Alice has Borderline Personality Disorder, which is a controversial
diagnosis. It seems not even the DSM can quite agree what constitutes BPD, or how to treat it, so
it will be interesting to see how it's portrayed in Welcome to Me. However, Wiig shined in The Skeleton Twins, a bittersweet film about a pair of twins (Wiig
and Bill Hader) whose family has a history of mental health issues, and the reviews of Welcome to Me have been quite positive.
This video gives us a little taste of what Welcome to Me has in store, and although
trailers can be misleading, this feels like it has a good balance of absurdity
and existential dread. Plus, how excited are we to see Joan Cusack?! James
Marsden, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Wes Bentley also appear in the movie, which is directed by Shira Piven.