'Welcome to Me': Sharing her self-obsession

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?

An emotional train wreck played to perfection by Saturday Night Live alumna Kristen Wiig, Alice is the protagonist of director Shira Piven's pointed satire, Welcome to Me, a brutal dissection of the American soul in the Age of Oprah.

At turns horribly funny and simply horrific, Piven's film suggests our therapeutic age has reduced us all to psychic cripples who resort to emotional exhibitionism in lieu of honest self-examination and self-expression.

Alice is a lonely, divorced, unemployed veterinary tech in her mid-40s whose various psychiatric ailments are so intractable they qualify her for disability checks.

She spends her days watching old Oprah episodes. She has collected years worth of the stuff on the VHS tapes that crowd her apartment. It's clear Alice has watched them over and over again: She acts out every one of Oprah's gestures and recites each word by heart. At night, she watches infotainments.

Eager to prove she can heal herself - her TV, which has continuously been on for 11 years, tells her she can - Alice decides to switch her antipsychotic meds for a high-protein diet. Munching on string cheese during a session with her increasingly alarmed psychiatrist, Dr. Moffat (Tim Robbins), Alice explains how she'll stabilize her moods by keeping to high protein and low "carbohydrants" (as she calls them).

Then one sunny day, the worst possible disaster that could befall this sad, pitiable soul comes to pass. She wins the lottery to the tune of $86 million - enough money to ensure she can bring every one of her delusions into reality.

With help from her only friend, Gina (Linda Cardellini), Alice moves into a luxurious suite at a casino hotel in Palm Springs, Calif., and goes about realizing her greatest ambition: to host a talk show.

"I have an idea for a show," Alice tells the sleazy, money-grubbing head of the local infotainment production company, Rich (a very funny James Marsden).

Asked by Rich's colleagues (Jennifer Jason Leigh and Joan Cusack) what topics she wants to cover, Alice simply replies, "Me." She gives a decided "no" when asked whether she'll have guests on the two-hour show.

The subject will be "what I like, what I'm feeling, who I think is a [bleep], my spirituality . . . me." She'll come on set in a swan boat, Alice goes on to explain, and she'll also have reenactments of key traumatic scenes from her childhood.

Then, the would-be star writes out a $15 million check to make it all happen.

Called Welcome to Me, Alice's show is a disaster. But it's like a gruesome car crash: We can't help but watch as the film offers one scene after another of Alice making a fool of herself on live TV. Wiig proves herself a master of timing, wringing every ounce of comic embarrassment she can from the situation.

It's hard to believe Piven's film would command the viewer's interest for long: Her heroine is all but repulsive. Alice may have inspired pity, even compassion at first, but the power money gives her transforms her into a monster.

Yet, she fascinates. Perhaps it's because deep inside, we know she's a monster we might recognize when we look in the mirror in the morning.

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