Wel­come to Me

Don­ald Trump’s The Appren­tice (and/​or elec­tion cam­paign) might be the tip of the ice­berg when it comes to becom­ing aware of the vast­ness of America’s ​‘Me, myself and I’ cul­ture. Alice (Kris­ten Wiig) wins $86 mil­lion on the lot­tery and decides to start her own talk show.

Wel­come to Wel­come to Me. There are two rea­sons to take note of a movie that tack­les ego­cen­trism: first, it’s always exhil­a­rat­ing to watch some­one else ridi­cul­ing – artis­ti­cal­ly or oth­er­wise – an atti­tude you despise but you can’t help repro­duc­ing; sec­ond, Alice is much eas­i­er on the eye (and about a bil­lion times less scary) than Trump.

You could miss the com­ic poten­tial of the movie by skim­ming the syn­op­sis: Alice is suf­fer­ing from a bor­der­line per­son­al­i­ty dis­or­der. She organ­is­es things by colour, loves Oprah Win­frey and becomes mad­ly impul­sive when spend­ing her win­nings. Who bet­ter than Sat­ur­day Night Live’s com­ic-in-chief to embody such a nut­ty char­ac­ter? The rest of the cast is equal­ly well-cho­sen: the actors’ phys­i­cal char­ac­ter­is­tics nice­ly rep­re­sent their inner char­ac­ter. But even the most human roles – the man­han­dled psy­chother­a­pist and the aban­doned best friend – aren’t immune to grotesque clichés.

Once the open­ing embar­rass­ment pass­es, you get the feel­ing that things will only get worse. Laugh­ter becomes a bet­ter alter­na­tive than think­ing these scenes (could) hap­pen. Direc­tor Shi­ra Piv­en paints a rather neg­a­tive pic­ture of Amer­i­cans’ pen­chant for out­ra­geous­ness, but nev­er goes so far as to ques­tion it. In the moment, it works just fine, even if it feels like a nev­er-end­ing out­let for human stu­pid­i­ty that lacks a dra­mat­i­cal­ly com­pelling endgame.

Feel­ing embar­rassed for Alice is nat­ur­al – every­thing you don’t want her to do, she does. It’s like watch­ing your favourite sport team los­ing a game over and over and over. But after 90 mins of humil­i­a­tion, it becomes rather tir­ing. And despite a few hilar­i­ous per­for­mances, it’s all about as sub­tle as, well, $86 million.