Director(s): Pete Docter & Ronaldo Del Carmen
Runtime: 94 minutes
Pixar has a long history of finding unique ways to hit our emotions. This is, after all, the studio that got us to care about plastic toys, fish, and robots. Yet the studio has never confronted the very nature of emotion until now. With Inside Out, directors Pete Docter and Ronaldo Del Carmen have turned Pixar's power to the trickiest of concepts to visualize: human memory, emotion, and imagination. These three parts of thought have such a conceptual limitless to them that pinning them down with concrete imagery can be daunting. One risks creating a world that feels too slipshod to work as a setting for sincere drama. Thankfully, after a few years of divisive offerings, Pixar has made a remarkable turn around with its latest. Docter, Del Carmen, and the whole Pixar think tank have creating a vibrant, resonant, and emotionally mature tribute to the vastness of human feeling.
As portrayed here, each human mind is dominated by five key players: Joy (Amy Poehler), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Disgust (Mindy Kaling), Fear (Bill Hader), and Anger (Lewis Black). The emotions are in charge of handling responses as well as the formulation and storing of memories, which take the form of colored orbs.
We first meet these five inside the head of Riley (Kaitlyn Dias), an eleven year old girl whose parents (Diane Lane and Kyle MacLachlan) have just relocated from Minnesota to San Francisco. Without giving away too many details, things go awry when the emotions try to adjust with the move to California, and Riley's emotions are thrown into chaos. In the upheaval, spritely leader Joy and downer Sadness are knocked out of central command and stranded in Long Term Memory.
Following in classic Pixar fashion, Inside Out is built around a quest to find something/one important after being separated by larger forces. Joy and Sadness' journey back to HQ is mirrored in Riley's own desire to go back to Minnesota, the source of all of her best memories. The internal journey, however, proves to be far more imposing than the external one. Riley's brain is filled with an array of brilliantly designed locales that allow Docter and Del Carmen to have a great deal of visual fun along the way. Some ideas are more literal (a train of thought is just that), while others rely more on invention (dreams are created on sound stages like movies).
Yet with so much room for dazzlement, Inside Out never strays from its main story for the sake of spectacle. Poehler and Smith are smartly cast in their respective emotions, and the focus on such polar opposites creates an unconventionally winning buddy adventure. Poehler brings that Leslie Knope optimism to Joy, creating a well-intentioned, yet occasionally narrow-sighted go getter. Smith, a regular on The Office, brings an authenticity to Sadness, without dragging down the film's overall mood.
In fact, at the end of the day, Sadness might actually be the true hero of Inside Out. Sadness, as an emotion, is so often discouraged that it's often viewed as a negative. No one wants to feel sad, of course, but it's an emotion that fares better when it's faced head on, rather than repressed. The magic of Inside Out is that it refuses to turn Sadness into a Debbie Downer-esque punchline. She's valid, and in some cases, the one best equipped to handle what's going on.
At 94 minutes, Inside Out feels extra brisk, so it's a testament to those involved that the deeper moments hit as hard as they do. More than any of Pixar's previous films, Inside Out is the sort of kids' movie that will resonate far deeper with older audiences. The kids can come for the zippy adventure, colorful vistas, and slapstick comedy, while everyone else can come to laugh through the tears. To label Inside Out as a "kids' movie" feels condescending, given that it's all so rich with ideas and emotional honesty. This one really is for all ages.
Grade: A-
Director: Alfonso Gomez-Rejon
Runtime: 105 minutes
Me and Earl and the Dying Girl might be THE most Sundance-y/indie/capital-Q "quirky" movie to hit theaters in the past half decade, or even decade. This is not a compliment. It is 105 minutes of the most grating stereotypes of quirky only without the self awareness one would find in a Saturday Night Live skit. The best possible outcome for American independent cinema would be that Earl is the final nail in the coffin for the Quirky Teen Dramedy genre, and not the inspiration for dozens more likeminded films.
Among the biggest issues plaguing Alfonso Gomez-Rejon's debut feature is that the titular Me is, quite simply, one of the worst protagonists in recent memory. Pittsburgh teenager Greg (Thomas Mann) is an awkward film geek with only one real friend. He also has low self-esteem and constantly rejects compliments about everything from his intelligence to his looks. So even though there's a Dying Girl involved, this is very much Greg's story, and that's a terrible, terrible thing. Greg's self-loathing has little basis, and his repeated mentions of his supposed deficiencies eventually sound less like an esteem problem and more like a ploy for unearned praise.
Of course, this means that the only thing that can help Greg change is a QUIRKY girl with some ISSUES. Of course, unlike similar films, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl's issue isn't that she's flighty or avoids serious issues. Instead, she has leukemia. Because, as The Fault in Our Stars showed us last year, nothing gets people going like kids going through first love with a nice side of chemo. In fairness, of all the cliched aspects of Me and Earl, the Dying Girl is actually the most genuine part of the film. Rachel (Olivia Cooke) isn't a brave smiling angel. Instead, she's a no nonsense kid who can cut through bullshit when she sees it. She's also got that wise-beyond-her-years vibe that could have been grating but thanks to Cooke feels totally natural. In essence, she's a more emotionally open version of Daria.
And yet even though Rachel is going through...what was it, oh yeah, LEUKEMIA, she gets sidelined in favor of the insufferable Greg and his BFF Earl (RJ Cyler). Except, y'know, since this whole thing is one big QUIRKY (TM) affair Greg won't refer to Earl as his friend. He's his "co-worker." Now, I know that Homer Simpson is not supposed to be a model citizen, but Me and Earl would have been improved significantly had Mr. Simpson sped by in his car and thrown out a drive-by "NEEEEEEEERRRRRDDD!!!" at Greg, and maybe Earl as well.
Earl's problems are a horse (and person) of a different color. Because we're apparently still in the late 90s, Earl is the Black Best Friend. He lives only a short walk from Greg, but in a "rougher" part of town (can you decode the language?). Earl's purpose is basically to stand there and be a emotional sounding board but he's different because, like, he's not white and that's super nifty, but he doesn't need a personality or agency. Hell, South Park's Token Black character has more dimensions.
But perhaps none of the above would be so troubling (also: infuriating, groan-inducing, etc...) if the script weren't so rotten to the core. Jesse Andrews' adaptation of his own novel is stilted at best. At worst, it's unforgivably manipulative and so forcibly twee that Wes Anderson looks butch by comparison (the film would have benefitted immensely from his touch). As far as heavily contrived dramatic moments go, Me and Earl builds to one that gives the whole of Men, Women, and Children a run for its money. This is also not a good thing.
Gomez-Rejon, an accomplished TV director, at least does his best to inject some energy into Andrews' self-satisfied tale. But the energetic camera work only exacerbates the problems with the script and in Mann's central performance. Greg's self-loathing/thinly-veiled narcissism smother the comedy, and bring hollowness to the drama. Only Cooke is on the right wavelength for her material, but she's often more of an emotional and thematic catalyst than a real character. Rachel deserves to be more than a device to push Greg outside of his comfort zone. But that would require conviction and a willingness to break away from stifling conventions, which Me and Earl and the Poorly Served Dying Girl has precious no time for. Cliches and tropes don't have to be burdens if they're properly managed (and tweaked). Unfortunately, Andrews' story is so in love with sob story expectations that there's never room for Me and Earl to do anything but drown in its own cloying artifice.
Grade: F
Director: Saverio Costanzo
Runtime: 113 minutes
Parenthood can be a scary thing, but hopefully not as scary as the woes that befall the central young couple in Saverio Costanzo's Hungry Hearts. It also likely won't descend to such stupid depths. Substitute the supernatural elements of Rosemary's Baby for paranoid veganism, and you get the drama at the center of Costanzo's latest film. It's certainly not a bad set up, and the Italian director (adapting Marco Franzoso's novel) gets some solid mileage purely based on the atmosphere. But after a compelling first half, Hungry Hearts degenerates into a series of increasingly idiotic actions and reactions by characters who barely have a single note to play over and over for two hours.
Young couple Jude and Mina (Adam Driver and Alba Rohrwacher) first meet after getting locked together in a foul-smelling bathroom in Chinatown. They struggle, in vain, to call for help, amused and disgusted by the absurdity of their predicament. Jump forward to the next scene, and they're living together. And then another scene comes by and they're married. And then Mina's pregnant. Costanzo keeps the pace going nicely as he covers these relationship milestones, using them as building blocks before the heft of the narrative arrives.
Where things change is after Mina gives birth, and insists on keeping the new (and never named) baby boy "pure." That means not going outside, or eating processed foods, or anything derived from animals. While Jude is a vegetarian, Mina is a hardcore vegan, and her intense devotion to her son's diet starts having adverse effects.
Unfortunately, from this point on, Costanzo's camera work evolves far more than his characters. Jude and Mina's anti-meet-cute unfolds over a single cramped shot. Other early scenes involve long, eye-level close ups. Most of these are reserved for Mina/Rohrwacher, whose face has a constant look of deeply-buried fear. And then, when things really start going down hill, the shots become wider, and Costanzo and cinematographer Fabio Cianchetti break out the fish-eye lens. Some of the later shots feel like rejected material from a David Lynch movie, and not necessarily in a good way.
Where Hungry Hearts really goes awry is in the behavior of its characters as Mina's paranoia increases. Jude is happy to standby and trust his wife, but even when he starts undermining her orders, he remains a weak-willed pushover. This isn't automatically a bad thing from a writing angle, but given that Jude has absolutely no other characteristics, it leaves his actions looking like those of an idiot. Though he eventually does take some sensible actions, he gives Mina far too many breaks regarding her behavior. Eventually, he sneaks the child out of the house in order to feed him meat, rather than put his foot down and insist to Mina that her parenting method is stunting their son's growth. When Jude's mother Anne (Roberta Maxwell) confronts her son during one of these feeding trips, she practically speaks for the audience, asking what the hell Jude is doing.
While Jude is nothing but a concerned pushover, Mina is only allowed to be unhinged and resolute in her paranoia. She insists that she knows what's best, even when her husband gives her evidence to the contrary. Yet even a pushover like Jude shouldn't have trouble standing up to the waif-like Mina. Her determination is disturbing, but not exactly intimidating. If she ever tried to do anything truly crazy, all Jude would have to do is cough on her and she'd probably be knocked off of her feet. Rohrwacher, for what it's worth, does what she can with the more expressive of the lead roles, but she fares better when she only has to act with her face, and not Costanzo's dialogue. I mean this as no slight against the actors themselves, but how Driver and Rohrwacher won the acting prizes at the 2014 Venice FIlm Festival is baffling.
To his credit, Costanzo manages to sustain the atmosphere from the first half all the way through to the end, but there simply isn't enough beyond that to make Hungry Hearts work. Jude's one dimensional personality only becomes a bigger problem when he tries to separate Mina and the baby, yet still gives her an unreasonable amount of access to visit the child. And Mina's freakish determination to keep her son pure is so clearly nuts in ambition that there's never room to question who's right and who's wrong. Jude and Anne are right, and Mina clearly just needs help. Lots of it. There's no room for nuance or doubt to lend this tale of marital strife a sense of balance or mystery. It's a one note enterprise under the impression that if it keeps playing louder and louder, it'll eventually turn into a melody.
Grade: C
Director: Asghar Farhadi
Runtime: 119 minutes
Pitched somewhere between the ghostly mysteries of Gone Girl and Under the Sand, and the existential malaise of L'Avventura, About Elly is another stunner from Iranian director Asghar Farhadi. And even though Elly isn't technically Farhadi's most recent film, it nonetheless represents a step forward after 2013's meandering The Past. Though less pummeling in its verbal intensity than A Separation, About Elly is a steadily absorbing drama that hauntingly captures the consequences of seemingly tiny deceptions.
When Farhadi finished making About Elly, he was still several years away from taking home an Oscar for 2011's A Separation. Yet despite the former film's strong reputation and success on the festival circuit, Farhadi's (by the rest of the world) 09 film, his third feature is only now landing stateside. So, if you've been keeping track of the film since the beginning, you've had quite the wait. Whether you consider the film a member of the class of 09 or the class of 15, it belongs among the best.
Plot-wise, Elly most closely mimics the above-mentioned Antonioni classic: a group of middle class (more emphasis on the middle in Farhadi's film) friends enjoy a relaxing weekend until one member of their party vanishes. In this case, the missing person is the titular Elly (Taraneh Alidootsi), a teacher in the company of one her student's parents, as well as their friends. Though Elly is often quite shy, she mostly gets along with her fellow vacationers. That is, until she's left to watch several of the children on the beach, and disappears, resulting in one couple's child almost drowning.
When About Elly begins, Farhadi floods the screen with names and faces and voices. Like Elly, we feel a bit lost, even amid such charming company. Gradually, the names and faces sort themselves out, leading to a lovely scene where the ensemble plays a clumsy game of charades. This scene, fully of joking and merriment, is totally sincere, yet also cleverly deceptive. It's at this point when Farhadi shares some warmth between characters and audience members. And yet...it's also the point where the noose is stealthily dropped around one's neck.
After gently easing the viewer in the lives of his characters, Farhadi's big moment comes in and hits like a ton of bricks. The vanishing/near-drowning sequence is wrenching, white-knuckle material, directed with great energy without slipping into mawkishness. Though About Elly continues at a steady pace, Farhadi's writing tightens that damn noose nudge by nudge, and it's riveting to witness on both an intellectual and emotional level.
Like A Separation, About Elly could have easily been produced as a play, yet the director knows how to open his material up enough so that it can benefit from cinematic techniques. Set almost entirely in a crumbling seaside villa, the film gets considerable mileage out of characters navigating their idyllic getaway/hellish psychological prison. The villa is hardly a visually pleasing locale, but Farhadi and cinematographer Hossein Jafarian turn it into an exquisitely dynamic space as the various and sundry secrets and lies spill forward. One of the most satisfying traits of Farhadi's work is that, at its best, it acts as both an honest representation of modern Iran and a compelling, self-contained narrative. These two sides are understandably linked together, yet About Elly's script is able to elegantly weave social commentary in narrative, and vice versa.
And as much credit as the man in the director's chair deserves, it would be silly to downplay the achievements of the ensemble. Though Sepideh (Golshifteh Farahani), Elly's friend (...kinda), comes closest to main character status, About Elly is an ensemble piece at its core. The various couples (and the lone bachelor) gradually emerge as distinct personalities, and the actors all fit seamlessly into Farhadi's style. Farahani comes across as the most complex, given her connections to the missing woman of the hour, but everyone who appears on screen justifies their presence and involvement. Peyman Moadi, the phenomenal lead of A Separation, is just one of About Elly's many stellar performances that sharpens the impact of Farhadi's film to such a fine point.
To watch a cast like this work with such harrowing, articulate material is a thing of rare beauty: each face is distinct, yet in each one we can see the entire film. Farhadi's film is most certainly about Elly, but also about each of every one of the lives affected by a deceptively simple vanishing act. Was it an act of selfish liberation or a heartbreaking tragedy? With its haunting final scenes, Farhadi suggests that, like the other elements of his film, the answer lies in the maddening void somewhere in between.
Grade: A
Director: Andrew Niccol
Runtime: 102 minutes
In terms of subject matter, director Andrew Niccol (Gattaca) could not have chosen a more timely arena for his latest film: drone warfare. Unmanned craft (especially the weaponized form) are political and ethical lightning rods, and not without reason. If you've heard of them, you likely have some strong opinions about how they should and shouldn't be used. If only Niccol's film was as stirring as the debate it wades into. Good Kill, though a marked improvement over Niccol's recent films, is affecting for brief moments, but mostly succumbs to either listlessness or misjudged melodrama (or both).
At the heart of Good Kill's moral queasiness is Maj. Tommy Egan (Ethan Hawke), a former pilot who now spends his days cramped inside a metal box on a Las Vegas airbase. Inside said metal box is the high-tech ground control for drones operating thousands of miles away. Without ever risking a crash (or even being detected), Egan and his teammates are able to take out targets as they please with brutal efficiency.
Yet the drones' all-seeing eyes can cause more stress than one might think. Early on, Egan and his commander (Bruce Greenwood), watch helplessly as a woman in Pakistan's Waziristan region is raped by a neighbor (a neighbor who may or may not be an insurgent). Since the drones' only weapons are missiles, there's nothing that can be done to stop the horrific act, even though Egan and co. are the only outsiders bearing witness to the woman's suffering. Scenes like this get Good Kill off to a solid start, promising something of a variation on The Hurt Locker in regards to depicting the thornier aspects of military life. The life of drone pilots is one of much greater contrast than that of a foot soldier. At the end of his shift, Tommy drives a few miles to a wife (January Jones) and two kids. He gets to fight the allegedly good fight with no more than some simple clicks in an air-conditioned room.
Though the personal advantages of this sort of work are obvious, Tommy begins to doubt the integrity of his orders once the CIA enters the fray. With Langley suddenly calling the shots via conference call, there's a new layer of disassociation added to Tommy's supposedly necessary strikes. Instead of conferring with other people face to face before lighting up a target, he now takes orders from the cryptic bureaucratic droning of a voice coming out of a headset. The CIA spokesman's voice, combined with Niccol's eerily tight shots of the phoneset's red speaker light, call to mind a white collar HAL9000. Sure, the drone is an impersonal weapon, but more than any other soldier committing morally questionable acts, it really was just following orders.
The CIA's orders, which push Egan and his team beyond their comfort zones on a regular basis, are the beginning of Egan's unravelling. But rather than build momentum, Niccol's script starts to flail. One early confrontation between Hawke and Jones plays out with a level of intensity that makes one wonder if the scene was actually supposed to come near the end of the film. Later developments don't fare much better. Once Tommy finally opens up to his wife, he spills his guts so rapidly that you'll wonder if you zoned out and accidentally missed some transitional scenes.
Niccol's visual style doesn't do much to amplify his interior story. Camera work and editing are solid during the drone sessions, but everything else is scattershot. Due to filters and/or color correction, Good Kill often looks unpleasantly oversaturated. And when the frame isn't filled with synthetic coloring, it's draped in some oppressive shadows. Nighttime scenes in Tommy's bedroom look like they belong in a bad noir, with only ugly bursts of orange light breaking up the darkness. And Tommy's aforementioned confessions to his wife play out in a bizarre, stilted pastoral shot that has Hawke and Jones stand side-by-side like they're delivering lines for an experimental piece of theater.
Beyond its subject matter, Good Kill is also a waste of some perfectly talented actors. Mr. Hawke's performance stumbles here and there, but that mostly comes down to Niccol's writing and direction. For the most part, Hawke does a good job with the wounded stoic routine, making Egan's journey coherent and convincing, even when the film lurches from one IMPORTANT development to the next. Although even Hawke is left powerless by the tastelessness of the final scene, which wants to give Good Kill's protagonist a heroic moment while completely ignoring the ramifications of his actions so many miles away. Meanwhile Jones, though seriously miscast opposite someone of Hawke's age (is it that hard to find someone age appropriate?), is actually quite good with her role as the put-upon wife trying to hold onto her marriage. Egan's military peers, top-lined by Greenwood and Zoe Kravitz, do nice work as well, especially the latter. One can only imagine what they all might have accomplished had they been in the hands of a script that dared to be more than thinly-sketched portrait of one of modern warfare's most polarizing advancements.
Grade: C
Director: George Miller
Runtime: 120 minutes
For a movie franchise that has lain dormant for 30 years, George Miller's Mad Max saga has never looked or sounded better. Both a sequel to and a reimagining of Miller's original trilogy, this long-in-the-works film is an exhilarating, exhausting, and loopy adventure that has what so many blockbusters lack: a personality. For better and for worse (mostly for better), Fury Road is undeniably an un-compromised work from a singular vision that has clearly stayed limber.
That singular vision is amplified, not restricted, by the limitations of the story. Despite several well-chosen lulls across the film's two hours, Fury Road boils down to one big chase. With this straightforward template laid out, Miller is able to stuff each scene to the gills with visual and sonic flourishes. Frankly, a more complex plot would have only gotten in the way of Fury Road's blunt visceral impact.
For even though this tale of Max (Tom Hardy) and Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) on the run from a psychotic warlord touches on some important issues, it does so through the lens of an adventure. Imagine if Wagner had composed "The Ride of the Valkyries" while snorting cocaine, and you'll have a decent idea of what to expect from this cinematic circus maximus.
Like Max, the viewer is thrust into a post-apocalyptic nightmare with little time to fully understand the specifics. After Max's initial remarks (via voiceover), he is immediately captured by a group of thugs for the warlord Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne), a bloated mass of a man with a shock of white-blonde hair and eye make-up that would send the Devil packing. Joe's citadel contains many luxuries, but only for the chosen few. The huddled masses are at Joe's mercy, and their desperation comes through not just in their screams, but in the lifetime of trauma shown on their bodies. Fury Road takes the pop-punk dystopia elements of its predecessors and turns them up to 11. The scars and deformities are unlike anything you've ever seen, and that's just touching the surface of the warped imagination on display.
Since Miller's story and his characters' goals are so minimal, it comes down to these world-building details to make it all somewhat convincing. In that regard, Fury Road is a downright masterclass. Between 80 and 85% of the stunts that occur (and 100% of the vehicles used) are real, and it shows. There are cars stacked on top of oil tankers, and old-fashioned buggys covered in nasty metal spikes. There's a mega-truck that has a damn tractor mounted on the back. And, yes, there is a vehicle whose sole purpose is to blast screeching death metal, led by a demonic musician with an electric guitar that shoots fire. And yet, for all of the bombast on display, Miller refuses to become indulgent when showing off the madcap stunts of his ensemble. Fury Road is as subtle as a scream and has all the blunt force of a hurricane, but it's also an exercise in understanding when to give the audience a break.
Had Miller kept up the pace of the first half hour for the remaining 90 minutes, Fury Road's simplicity would have quickly become its undoing. Instead, Miller weaves in a string of moments that either greatly reduce the action, or stop it all together. Yet in these spaces that allow the eyes and ears to recover, Miller never loses control of his story's momentum. There are no expository flashbacks or longwinded speeches that threaten to grind the narrative to a halt. There is great seriousness amid Fury Road's chaos, but Miller never pushes it to the point of dour pretension.
The simplicity of the story is reflected in the simplicity of the characters, and that includes Hardy's Max. Max is, if anything, no more than a gateway character. His manic grunts and twitchy head movements (he spends a quarter of the film acting as a living IV bag, after all) show that he is a man pushed far over the edge. And yet Hardy never goes out of his way to steal the show. Max is the outlier of the story, and a surprisingly good fit to play second fiddle.
The first chair, quite clearly, belongs to Theron's bald, bionic woman, and Fury Road is all the better because of this. Max's motivation can be reduced to mere survival, but Furiosa is out for something that cuts deeper: redemption. In the bright orange wastelands of a world gone horrifically insane, she seeks asylum not just for herself, but for the living cargo she carries with her: five slave brides married to Joe for the purpose of breeding and producing milk.
Despite the muscle cars, explosions, and outlandishly macho cries for a glorious death, Mad Max might just be one of the most unabashedly feminist blockbusters in recent memory. Though Joe's slave brides spend most of the film in skimpy white bikinis, they prove to be more than damsels in distress. And, later on, Miller introduces an entire clan of warrior women of all ages, who prove up to the task of going toe-to-toe with Joe's horde of male soldiers. There are characters in Fury Road who exploit women, but Miller himself does all he can to empower them. Fury Road is about fighting against the odds, not post-apocalyptic love, and the dedication to life-or-death stakes leaves the film refreshingly asexual.
With only a few notable instances of visual effects (the most obvious being an overwhelming sandstorm), Mad Max stays relatively grounded (yes, even with the flame-spewing guitar) compared to contemporary blockbuster fare. It's a chase movie that lives and dies by the success of its vehicular carnage, and not by how many fantastical digital creations it can force onto the screen. There is madness aplenty, but it is sweaty, tear-streaked, gnarly madness rooted in a self-contained story. This isn't a tale about cataclysmic events that changed the world, but rather a story of survival long after the dust has settled, and there's nothing to do but charge forward. As Furiosa herself puts it, "You wanna get through this? Do as I say. Now pick up what you can, and run."
Grade: B+
Director: Shira Piven
Runtime: 88 minutes
Despite a fun set-up, Shira Piven's Welcome to Me is so totally linked to its central performance that it has little room to accomplish much else. Thankfully, star Kristen Wiig, in the latest of a recent string of indie releases, owns this offbeat dramedy from top to bottom. Piven's trim character study is so intensely focused on Wiig's Alice Klieg that there's little breathing room for anyone else. In fact, there's so little to be found in Welcome to Me outside of Wiig's performance, that the film often feels like nothing more than a performance showcase. Wiig offers some stellar comedic and dramatic acting, but the script's character-based tunnel vision prevents the project as a whole from being more than a gently moving trifle.
Like any normal person, Alice is stunned when she wins the local lottery of $86 million. Yet once we get a look at Alice's cramped apartment, it's clear that she's far from your average American struggling to get by (and hoping for a miracle). Not only is Alice bi-polar, she's also messing around with the meds prescribed by her doctor (Tim Robbins). An Oprah-worshipping shut-in, Alice decides that there's only one thing she really wants to use her new fortune for: a talk show built around herself. Understandably, she's met with incredulous looks when she proposes the idea to the staff of the local TV station (Joan Cusack, Jennifer Jason Leigh). The lone exception is Rich (James Marsden), the money-hungry head of the station, who gladly accepts check after check from Alice while his guilt-ridden brother/TV host Gabe (Wes Bentley) watches.
Outside of the character-based elements, Welcome to Me's second priority is clearly the way society portrays (and/or exploits) those with mental illnesses. Yet Eliot Laurence's tight (almost too tight) script never branches out further than the basic idea that such exploitation A) exists and B) isn't very nice. Especially given the recent treatment of celebrities with mental illness, these themes couldn't be more ripe for exploration. If the world of Network predicted the rise of sadomasochistic, morally uncomfortable TV content, then Welcome to Me simply drops us into that world long after the prophecy has come to pass.
Whether or not you find this to be a major issue will likely come down to how you respond to Alice and Wiig's performance. Even with the aforementioned themes present, Alice is Laurence and Piven's #1 priority by a gigantic margin. And, on that subject, the film more than gets the job done. Laurence has created a true original of a character, one who is never defined strictly by her diagnosis. And Wiig, who's been stretching her acting muscles recently, does some really wonderful work here that continues to prove her worth as convincing actress, regardless of genre.
The most obvious challenge with a film like Welcome to Me comes down to tone, and Piven's capturing of Laurence's writing is part of what keeps one involved with this increasingly sad character study. Wiig, meanwhile, has to contain the film's variations in tone without coming across as forced, and she does so beautifully. Funny, heartbreaking, and weird, it's a performance that feels truly human, and not like a checklist of mental health symptoms.
Other characters may not get anywhere near the depth afforded to Alice, but Piven's film is filled with small gems from the talented ensemble. Bentley and Marsden are perfectly matched as the polar opposite brothers, the former of whom eventually earns Alice's romantic attention. Bentley's character is the most similar to Alice, and where others watch confusion and embarrassment, he watches with great empathy. Cusack is good for a handful of exasperated reaction shots, as is Leigh (though the latter's role is basically pointless).
The most meaningful supporting performance comes from Linda Cardellini as Alice's best friend Gina. Of all of the relationships featured in Welcome to Me, this is the one that would have been worthy of a few extra scenes. Though Alice has her own problems, she can be obsessed with herself to the point where she drives others away. This dynamic comes through the clearest with Gina, though some of the finale's impact is undercut by Gina's marginalization throughout the story. With more focus on the Gina/Alice dynamic, which goes back to their childhoods, more of Welcome to Me could have truly lingered. Instead, it's only Alice who really stays with you. Not surprising, as it's probably what she would've wanted.
Grade: B-
