Welcome to Me

Comedy is hard. Black comedy is almost impossible. The Coen Brothers can do it, but even they made missteps like The Ladykillers and Intolerable Cruelty. It is not be toyed with.

Will Ferrell and Adam McKay are behind 2014's Welcome to Me, which is supposedly a comedy starring Kristen Wiig has a woman with borderline personality disorder who goes off her meds. She wins the lottery, and ends up paying a local network that mostly runs infomercials for her own talk show, which is a trainwreck.

A lot of things are wrong with this film, starting with the script by Eliot Laurence. Wiig's character is sympathetic, which is a problem. She refers to a once normal life as a veterinary nurse and was married, but when we join her she keeps the TV running 24/7 and whenever she wants to say anything she says, "I have a prepared statement." She also has a completely normal friend, Linda Cardellini.

She sees a psychiatrist (Tim Robbins) who wants her back on Abilify and tries to have her committed. The brothers who run the network (James Marsden and Wes Bentley) are either gleefully taking her money or having sex with her. Stop me when any of this sounds funny.

I suppose the funny parts are her actual show, when she does cooking segments and mispronounces carbohydrates and re-enacts scenes from her childhood, all while slandering people. One cliche the film avoids is having her become a success--she gets very little ratings, beating only The Fresh Prince of Bel Air reruns.

This film saddened me more than anything else. Wiig is very good, maybe too good, and I felt like I was spying on a very sick woman. I wasn't amused by any of it. Wiig puts everything into the role, including a full frontal nude scene.

Others in the cast are Joan Cusack and a really tiny role played by Jennifer Jason Leigh, which makes me think most of her part ended up on the cutting room floor. The film is directed without distinction by Shira Piven.