“Come
with me. Into another time that happened to me.”
Having a mental health disorder is not fun at all. I
suffer from depression and anxiety that are symptoms of ADHD. All three suck
beyond belief. Some days I can manage and some days I feel like a total monster
and hate myself and everyone around me. I have to say that I feel lucky that I do
not suffer from a mental health disorder that is more serious. I feel terrible
for the people that do because having something wrong with your head is not
fun. Movies with people suffering from a mental health disorder tend to make me
uncomfortable since I know a little about what they must be going through.
Sometimes I get uncomfortable when a character goes off their meds because I want
to yell at them to stay on them! And sometimes I get uncomfortable with how
they are seen by other characters. I hate the fact that there is a stigma with
any kind of health disorder let along a mental health one. We are not crazy or
selfish or incapable of being normal human beings. It is just harder to
function at times.
In the movie Welcome
to Me, Kristen Wiig plays a character Alice Klieg who suffers from
borderline personality disorder. She lives alone in a small apartment where she
has kept her TV on for eleven years straight. She also has a lot of VHS tapes
that have recorded episodes of Oprah on them. Alice has watched some of the
episodes so many times she knows them by heart.
Alice wins eighty-six million dollars in a local lottery.
She immediately leaves her small home and goes to live in a casino on a
reservation. One day she takes her friend to be in the audience of a talk show.
The host of the show, Gabe, asks for a volunteer from the audience and Alice
just comes walking down without being picked. She immediately tries to take
over the show and the producers think she is a little nuts but they keep going
with her. Gabe and his brother Rich (James Marsden) are the producers of the
show and own their own network. Alice wants to have her own talk show like
Oprah. But unlike Oprah where she had guests and had a theme to her episodes
Alice just wants to talk about herself and do things that she finds interesting.
Rich and the other producers do not want a show like that they wants a brand
but are quickly quieted when Alice hands them a check for a couple of millions of
dollars to get the show going.
The show is just a complete mess. Alice’s emotional state
comes through with every episode and no one knows how to handle it. She puts on
reenactments of events in her life that she saw as traumatic but she never
changes the name of the people. In another episode she has her psychiatrist on
the line without him knowing. Her doctor in the meantime is worried about her
because she had decided to go off her meds. Eventually Alice has a break down
and the show is being sued by a lot of people. She also has been neglecting her
only friend from being so focused on herself.
In the end Alice somewhat overcomes her hurdles with
being self-absorbed and neglecting her friend. When she goes home one night
Gabe gives her a video camera and she films herself finally shutting off her
TV.
Welcome to Me
was a good movie. Kristen Wiig is an amazing talent. I like how she can easily
go from doing silly ridiculous comedy to dramadies. She was fantastic in this
movie and makes it worth watching. Welcome
to Me, as I said, is a little unsettling and uncomfortable, but it was good
it has one of the most interesting stories in a movie I have seen in a while.
This is a movie I definitely suggest seeing especially if you like Kristen Wiig
and would like to see something different.
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