Here's Kristen Wiig as an Oprah fan with borderline personality disorder who wins the lottery and buys a talk show of her own. And from the primordial soup of lite-sax-soundtracked self-help infomercials, a monster emerges. Linda Cardellini plays Wiig's variously disappointed best friend, and it's a promising start. Directed by Shira Piven, from Eliot Laurence's script, Welcome to Me has some emotional cleverness to prove, and accordingly seems less soul-searching than self-important. It does help to get a sense that Wiig, who's good, really wanted to do it. Maybe not as much as Peter Sellers wanted to be in Being There, but of course screen-culture meta-critique has evolved since then, and tender semi-satires about idiot savants falling into social significance no longer play in quite the same way. Getting duller as it goes, Piven's movie just plods along, seeming more and more like a mishmash of The Truman Show and some Miranda July performance piece that you can't decide whether to adore or disdain. Or more basically, like an SNL sketch that's been relegated to late in the broadcast for being a little risky, but still has that familiar flaw of running too long. How it will end becomes a less compelling question than when it will end.
Comments are closed.
