Welcome to Me (2015)
Directed by Shira Piven
A year in the life of Alice Klieg, a woman with Borderline personality disorder who wins the Mega Millions lottery, quits her meds and buys her own talk show.
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3 films that influenced Welcome to Me
What critics say influenced Welcome to Me
Elements of it echo Network, the 1976 classic in which a news anchor retains his job after he clearly loses his mind, because he’s boosting ratings.
Even as its setting beckons in the direction of classic media cautionary tales like “Network” and “Broadcast News” (with perhaps a smattering of the “Anchorman” movies, whose key talents Will Ferrell and Adam McKay are among the producers here), “Welcome to Me” never devolves into a finger-wagging denunciation of television, any more than it becomes a hand-wringing portrait of the ravages of mental illness.
The influences are obvious — Alice is distant cousin to Chance the gardener in “Being There,” Howard Beale in “Network,” and Rupert Pupkin in “The King of Comedy” — but the comparisons don’t really do the movie favors.
It could have turned into something like Network, The Truman Show, or Nightcrawler, a tsunami-cesspool of media criticism.
Wiig plays her role with total commitment, fearlessness, and lack of vanity...the movie we deserve in the age of social media and cable television, a satiric child of Paddy Chayevsky's Network in its autopsy of "vox populi" viral video...
Director Shira Piven and screenwriter Eliot Laurence made mention to Network and The Truman Show during their Q&A after my TIFF screening, but I don’t think such comparisons hold a candle to Sherman’s photography, challenging audiences with staged depictions of women in society and the media.
The influences are obvious — Alice is distant cousin to Chance the gardener in “Being There,” Howard Beale in “Network,” and Rupert Pupkin in “The King of Comedy” — but the comparisons don’t really do the movie favors.
The movie takes its lead from other “TV eats the soul” flicks like “Being There” (1980), “The King of Comedy” (1983) and “EDtv” (1999).
But sixty years later charm proves in short supply, and tonally the movie owes less to Holliday’s than to Martin Scorsese’s dark, mordant “The King of Comedy.”
Although it clearly bears some genetic relationship to previous media satires, stretching back all the way to “Network” and “A Face in the Crowd” – and most assuredly including “Being There” and “The King of Comedy” – “Welcome to Me” has an acrid and delicious flavor that is highly contemporary and entirely its own.
“ Network ,” “ The King of Comedy ,” “ Being There ,” “ The Truman Show ” and its cousin “EDtv”—“Welcome to Me” owes a debt to each and every one as it comments on the skewed state of celebrity and the ongoing popularity of reality shows.
Marketers would be wise not to tie it to the coattails of Bridesmaids, which would be like pitching The King of Comedy to Nutty Professor fans.
Moody, narcissistic, and socially awkward, Alice Klieg has to be the most intolerable movie heroine to come along since Bette Davis and Joan Crawford's Hudson sisters from 1962's What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?