"Mental illness" is such an inadequate way to describe what's wrong with Alice Klieg (Kristen Wiig), because "illness" implies that the malady is only clouding an existing, healthy personality. But there is no healthier version of Alice underneath the hoarded bundles of lottery tickets and meticulously cataloged videotapes. Her therapist (Tim Robbins) would like her to start taking her meds again. Her best friend (Linda Cardellini) suggests small things she could do to make her life easier. Yet none of these ideas will be added to Alice's mysterious agenda, which includes snoozing until noon in a sleeping bag atop her still-made bed, buying Mega Millions tickets, and chanting along to recordings of the Oprah Winfrey show that she's memorized.
But one evening, Alice's ticket hits the 86-million-dollar jackpot. She suddenly has the wherewithal to do that "something great" that Oprah promised everyone has inside of them, and she knows exactly what she wants to do: host her own TV show, just like her role model. Her bottomless funds attract the interest (or tolerance, really) of a local station willing to broadcast a Network-style extravaganza featuring telephone fights with her mother, avant-garde reenactments of traumatic experiences from her life, and home and gardening tips -- which sometimes means recipes for cakes made out of meatloaf, and sometimes means neutering dogs on live TV. The show never really goes off the deep end, because it was never in the shallow end to begin with.
This outrageous conceit would never work without Kristen Wiig and her correct instincts regarding such a unique character. Alice could have been played broadly as a comedic role or deftly as a tragic one, but Wiig adopts the third, trickier strategy of never allowing a flicker of winking self-awareness to penetrate her portrayal of someone whose reality makes perfect sense to herself, and only herself. That's not to say that Alice isn't funny (or tragic, or creative, or capable of that "something great"), but Wiig wisely buries her comedic intelligence deep inside her, so we never see the magician's cards.
Movie characters are supposed to be "sympathetic" to win an audience's trust, but what does "sympathetic" really mean? It usually means that we understand and approve of a character's decisions, but that's a stretch when the majority of Alice's actions fall under the umbrella of Very Bad Ideas. But in most movies, female characters who act recklessly, behave selfishly, unfetter their sexuality, or lose their grip on dignity -- you know, behave like imperfect human beings -- are punished one way or another by the final reel. Instead, we accept Alice because Welcome to Me accepts Alice, unconditionally and graciously, even when she's making her TV entrance in a swan boat or parading naked through a casino in a delusional haze. What makes this inspirational black comedy (a very narrow genre subset that may only contain this film and Harold and Maude) delightful is that, eventually, Alice accepts Alice too. If that Herculean feat is possible, perhaps there's hope for all of us.