Toronto Report: Kristen Wiig Throws an Unhinged TV Party in 'Welcome to Me'

“I don’t want to say much about it,” Kristen Wiig told a packed Toronto International Film Festival screening this past weekend, shortly before unveiling her new comedy-drama, Welcome to Me. Maybe it was nerves, or a keen sense of punctual start-times that kept Wiig’s intro so brief. Or perhaps it was the fact that, once you start talking about Welcome to Me, it’s hard to stop.

Directed by Shira Piven (2011’s Fully Loaded) and written by Eliot Laurence, Welcome to Me stars Wiig as Alice, a depressive who lives in near-Hoarders fashion in a small apartment cluttered with VHS recordings of The Oprah Winfrey Show — episodes of which Alice has watched to the point of memorization. Her lone friend is Gina (Linda Cardellini) and her relationships with both her therapist (Tim Robbins) and her parents are strained, in part because Alice prefers to communicate using bluntly worded, painfully honest prepared statements.

But when Alice wins an $86 million jackpot, she finds the perfect audience for her inner monologues: daytime television. After taking up residence in a desert town casino, she uses her newfound winnings to finance her own talk show, Welcome to Me, at a dinky local cable studio headed by two disparately desperate brothers (James Marsden and Wes Bentley). With unlimited resources and complete creative control, Alice turns her show into a loopy on-air confessional/infomercial in which she rides around semi-regally in a swan boat, employs actors to re-create her childhood feuds, and talks at length about her high-protein diet (she also writes — and rewrites — a stream of melodically oblivious theme songs). Soon the show has become a viral hit, and Alice becomes engulfed by her own tube-enabled narcissism.

It’s hard to imagine anyone but Wiig as Alice. On Saturday Night Live, the actress’s characters — with their awkward gesticulations, anxious veneers, and quickly upended cheer — always hinted at some restless, even dangerous interior life. Welcome amplifies these tendencies. But without the burden of packing so much strangeness into a four-minute sketch, Wiig has more room to deepen and detail Alice, and as a result, her personality hiccups seem much more relatable — and all the more heartbreaking. Viewers tuning into her show for a few minutes might think she’s crazy, but for those who are paying close attention, she’s simply a woman who’s finally being given a chance to speak her mind.

Of course, Alice’s reign as a TV oddity doesn’t come without its consequences, as illustrated by a stark scene that occurs toward the end and requires a spoiler warning: After an emotional trauma, Alice walks through the casino floor, naked and alone. It’s a harrowing moment — one that’s already been the subject of some salacious headlines — and proof of how Wiig’s dramatic prowess sneaks up on you throughout the film.

There are a lot of small, joyful surprises in Welcome to Me and a lot of dark turns, as well. And unlike other movies about television (Network, The Truman Show), there’s not an ounce of cynicism about the medium, no condemnation of TV as an airborne toxic event. Instead, Welcome to Me celebrates TV for its potential for redemption, an idea that, even a few days after that first screening, is hard to turn off.

Photo credit: © Courtesy of Toronto Film Festival