Tag Archives: Kristen Wiig

May 08

“Welcome to Me”: A Different Kind of Therapy for BPD

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Kristen Wiig stars in the new indie dramedy Welcome to Me, written by Eliot Laurence and directed by Shira Piven. IMDB describes it as “(a) year in the life of Alice Klieg, a woman with Borderline Personality Disorder who wins Mega-millions, quits her meds and buys her own talk show.”

MORE ABOUT THE PLOT OF WELCOME TO ME

John DeFore, Hollywood Reporter, on her change of diagnosis to BPD:

Wiig’s Alice Klieg was diagnosed as a youth as a manic-depressive. While the diagnosis changed over the decades (her shrink, played by Tim Robbins, currently calls it Borderline Personality Disorder), Alice didn’t: Shelves of VHS tapes and a collection of ceramic swans attest to a lifelong fixation on a shallow sort of self-examination, the kind of hear-my-voice empowerment daytime TV was built on. When she wins an $86 million lottery, she seems less excited about the money than about the chance to read ‘a prepared statement’ about the story of her life to news cameras.

THE TRAILER

WHO IS ALICE?

Betsy Sharkey, Los Angeles Times: “Her particular brand of disorder means she is, as the saying goes, honest to a fault. Sometimes, that means reminding a good friend of her teenage bikini phobia on national TV, at others, it’s more graphic — like when a sexual urge hits her. Fortunately, this doesn’t happen a lot. More common is her raw emotional vulnerability.”

Christopher Gray, Slant:  “Beneath her acts of character assassination, Piven and Wiig suggest a searching in Alice that makes her both palatable and sympathetic. (The film only seems to look down on her when using her penchant to mispronounce words as a crutch for additional, unnecessary laughs.)…Wiig affords Alice with an occasionally startling range of false confidence and emotional vulnerability…”

Justin Chang, Variety: “There’s no doubt that Alice is effectively enacting a very public, very expensive form of self-therapy, but what makes Piven’s sophomore directing effort…such an offbeat delight for much of its running time is the way it privileges comedy over catharsis…Alice isn’t a puzzle that needs solving — she’s more fun unsolved, frankly — and the filmmakers seem well aware that of all the things this woman may need, our sympathy isn’t one of them.”

HOW MENTAL ILLNESS IS PORTRAYED IN WELCOME TO ME

Justin Chang, Variety: On her TV show, Alice, among other kinds of kooky segments, “proves astoundingly articulate on the subject of her illness and her treatment; and watches in critical dismay while younger actresses re-enact formative/traumatic episodes from her life.”

Christopher Gray, Slant: “The film rejects a fawning (or even particularly detailed) account of mental illness in favor of a plunge into the deep end of Alice’s bottomless ego.”

John DeFore, Hollywood Reporter: “The film is in no rush to ask whether Alice’s tsunami of ego is eccentricity we can enjoy or a serious illness that merits our concern. Dr. Moffet regularly urges her to get back on her medication, but casting Robbins in the part is like a signal that we shouldn’t take his lefty nanny-state advice too seriously.”

OTHER CHARACTERS

Susan Wloszczyna, rogerebert.com:

While some fine performers like Jennifer Jason Leigh get lost in the shuffle, others manage to stand out: Tim Robbins as Alice’s long-suffering if naggy pill-pushing shrink; Linda Cardellini as her one and only friend; Wes Bentley as the on-air infomercial spokesman whose company produces Alice’s show and who becomes her lover; and James Marsden as his opportunistic brother who serves as the film’s Faye Dunaway counterpart as he encourages Alice’s crackpot decisions no matter the consequences.

Leave it to Joan Cusack—has she ever been less than terrific?—to be the one person to be able to divert our attention from Wiig as the show’s disgusted director who nevertheless occasionally engages in a lively on-air back and forth with Alice as a kind of unseen God-like persona from beyond.

Oct 01

“The Skeleton Twins”: Siblings Suicidal

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According to the website for Craig Johnson‘s new film The Skeleton Twins, “Family is a cruel joke.”

Johnson places his emphasis here on the relationship between a brother and sister (Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader). Critic Andrew O’Hehir calls this new film “a potent sibling dramedy,” and Jonathan Kim (The Huffington Post) says it’s “movie siblings (finally) done right.”

Wiig and Hader, both well known for their stints on Saturday Night Live, are not, however, playing characters who have fun-filled lives. We know right from the start, in fact, that each is having serious suicidal thoughts. More like “Saturday Night Dead,” quips Richard Corliss, Time.

Geoff Berkshire, Variety, explains the plot further:

Aspiring actor Milo lives in Los Angeles and is fresh out of a failed relationship, while Maggie is a New York dental hygenist in a seemingly happy marriage to gregarious guy’s-guy Lance (Luke Wilson). Of the two, Milo is the one who goes through with it, slitting his wrists in a bathtub. It’s a phone call informing her that her brother is in the hospital that pulls Maggie back from the brink. She rushes to his side and, after some initial awkwardness, the ice is broken by a memorable gag involving ‘Marley and Me,’ effectively demonstrating their shared sense of humor.

Turns out they’ve been estranged for 10 years. Nevertheless, Milo lets his sister bring him back to Nyack, New York, the area where they grew up.

THE SKELETON TWINS

Jessica Zack, San Francisco Chronicle: “The twins share a dark sense of humor, and both grapple with why and how their lives became detached not just from each other, but from the paths of promise they thought were in store for them.”

David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter: “Milo uses humor as a natural defense mechanism, even if it doesn’t always mask the grimace of discomfort, while the more outwardly thorny Maggie subjects herself and everyone around her to wild mood swings. ‘Landmines, dude,’ explains Lance, about the challenges of navigating his wife’s volatility.”

Things are gradually revealed in this film that would have had more impact on me, I think, if I hadn’t read the reviews beforehand. For the sake of those who need to have certain info, though, in order to assess whether to see a dysfunctional-family movie, I will give some basic specifics—starting now—including that their mom (Joanna Gleason) is New-Agey, self-involved, and unavailable and that their dad killed himself when they were teens.

For therapy buffs (is there such a thing?), we learn in a brief scene that Milo and Maggie were sent to a shrink way back when. And that they didn’t respond so well to continually being asked to journal, journal, journal.

MORE ABOUT MILO 

Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune: “When he was 15, Milo was seduced by his high school English teacher (Ty Burrell), who is now back in the closet, with a 16-year-old son and trying to make his latest heterosexual relationship work. Milo’s return to Nyack unsettles this secret-laden educator, who now works in a bookstore.”

MORE ABOUT MAGGIE

Richard Corliss, Time: “She hides her grief behind a suburban housewife’s little festival of passive-aggressive behavior. In a particularly desperate moment, she screams into a pillow. And when she tells Lance ‘I love you,’ she means ‘I want to love you but can’t.” Lance, who everyone agrees is the most decent guy in the world, has a knitted-brow heartiness that grates on Maggie. Not his fault: his jock adolescence matured into love for this sweet, strange woman he can’t quite understand.”

MORE ABOUT LANCE

Andrew O’Hehir, Salon: “One of the most rewarding aspects of ‘Skeleton Twins’ is the unlikely alliance that sprouts between Lance and Milo, two guys who could hardly be more different. It would have been awfully easy to make Lance a homophobic jerk, but he doesn’t seem bothered by Milo’s sexuality at all. Instead he’s a decent, loving man with relatively modest aspirations, who has to come to grips with the fact that he barely knows the woman who claims to love him but has repeatedly lied to him.”

SELECTED REVIEWS

Jonathan Kim, Huffington Post: “The Skeleton Twins is very funny, but with touching and heartfelt scenes to go along with the film’s themes of suicide, depression, disappointment, and infidelity. And there are other themes that most adults, particularly siblings, will relate to — the fear that you peaked in high school, the disappointments of adulthood, wondering if you’re the most screwed up of your siblings, the difficulties of being true to yourself, and the questions and chasms left behind by an absent parent.”

David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter: “…The Skeleton Twins gets it right. Warm, funny, heartfelt and even uplifting, the film is led by revelatory performances from Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig, both of them exploring rewarding new dramatic range without neglecting their mad comedic skills.”

Geoff Berkshire, Variety: “…’The Skeleton Twins’ captures the way siblings develop their own unique comedic shorthands in a way few films ever have. Johnson also nails the flip side of that tight link: They’re capable of hurting each other like no one else can.”

Aug 28

“Hateship Loveship”: Quiet Caregiver with Interpersonal Issues

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In Hateship Loveship, a movie adapted from a short story by Alice Munro and directed by Liza Johnson, quiet and naive Johanna Parry (Kristen Wiig) starts working for a gruff elderly man, Mr. McCauley (Nick Nolte). His teenage granddaughter Sabitha (Hailee Steinfeld), who lives with him, cruelly tricks this new caregiver into believing that her father Ken (Guy Pearce) has romantic interest in her.

An important piece of the back story: Sabitha’s mom is dead because of an incident in which Ken was drunk at the wheel.

Justin Chang, Variety, explains how Sabitha’s con has roots in Ken’s kindness to Johanna: “…(H)e leaves the new housekeeper a note of encouragement — a nice gesture that Johanna, unaccustomed to being treated kindly or flirted with, takes it upon herself to answer. But her letter is intercepted by Sabitha and her troublemaking best friend, Edith (Sami Gayle), who, rather than mailing it as promised, write back to Johanna pretending to be Ken. With the unthinking malice that can come so easily to teens with technology at their disposal, the girls initiate a friendly and increasingly intimate email correspondence with the unsuspecting Joanna, who becomes thoroughly smitten with the man she thinks is keeping up his end of the conversation.”

Other notable characters in the film include Jennifer Jason Leigh as Ken’s drug-addicted girlfriend and Christine Lahti as a bank employee who might become a romantic interest for Mr. McCauley.

Watch the trailer below:

JOHANNA

Sheila O’Malley, rogerebert.com: “She has worked in the service of others, as a housemaid/nanny/nurse since she was 15. Her voice is soft and flat, and when she speaks, she uses functional practical language. She has feelings about the families with whom she lives, but you would never guess any of it looking at her face. She has no self-pity. And so, when Johanna suddenly awakens to love, early on in ‘Hateship Loveship,’ it is both electrifying and perilous. She is not used to being overwhelmed with feelings, sexual and romantic, and she doesn’t know how to behave; she doesn’t know where to put it all.”

Justin Chang, Variety: “It’s an on-the-nose metaphor, perhaps, but for this quietly capable woman, cleaning house isn’t just a responsibility but also an escape, a form of therapy, and a far more practical solution than sulking or lashing out.”

Ann Hornaday, Washington Post: “…(W)e’ve never seen a protagonist quite like Johanna, who on the one hand personifies female self-abnegation at its most domesticated, but on the other embodies the sheer will at its most stubborn. She knows the value of elbow grease, whether she’s redeeming a dirty kitchen floor or even a scruffier human soul.”

KEN

Sheila O’Malley, rogerebert.com: “His kindness to Johanna is not targeted or creepy, but automatic and casual. He is filled with self-loathing over his mistakes: his drug addiction, being a terrible dad unable to take care of his daughter, and knowing that everyone thinks he is a loser….’Hateship Loveship’ lets him be complex. It doesn’t ask us to come down on one side or the other. His actions are often reprehensible. And sometimes he is beautifully warm and accepting. Both are true.”

Sep 06

“Girl Most Likely”: Kristen Wiig’s Fake Suicide Attempt

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The critics have been unkind to Girl Most Likely, a film in which Imogene (Kristen Wiig), a Manhattan playwright, has been rejected by her boyfriend, a job, and some friends, and loses her apartment. To get the ex’s attention and/or sympathy, she stages a fake suicide attempt, which backfires. She winds up in the hospital, and the discharge plan involves living with her estranged mother Zelda (Annette Bening), a gambling addict.

Or, Another Movie Description…

Sara Stewart, New York Post: “This lazy comedy plays like a round of Quirky Indie Mad Libs: Kristen Wiig is a struggling New York (blank) who freaks out when (blank) and ends up back in Nowheresville, (blank), with her trashy mom who (blank) and her weird brother who (blank).”

Surely the Cast Makes This Worth Seeing?

Alonso Duralde, The Wrap: “‘Girl Most Likely’ is the kind of movie destined to become the answer to the rhetorical question, ‘With a cast this good, how bad can it be?’ You might think that any film featuring Kristen Wiig, Annette Bening, Matt Dillon and Darren Criss (not to mention supporting turns by Bob Balaban, Natasha Lyonne and June Diane Raphael) would have some redeeming qualities, but you would be incorrect.”

Are There Any Interesting Characterizations That Defy One Unified Mental Health Assessment? (That Would Be Ralph, Imogene’s Brother)

Sara Stewart, New York Post: “Broadway regular Christopher Fitzgerald brings the Zack Galifianakis-y edge as Imogene’s brother, Ralph, a mess of vaguely sketched agoraphobic dysfunction.”

Rex Reed, New York Observer: “Mentally challenged kid brother Ralph (Christopher Fitzgerald) wears oversized T-shirts that say ‘Crab Villa’ (emphasizing his obsession with all things crustacean) and crawls around on the floor inside a fiberglass mollusk shell.”

Other descriptions from top reviewers include “socially awkward,” “unusual,” “stunted,” “simple,” “intellectually disabled,” “special-needs,” and “unique.”

The Trailer:

In conclusion, Claudia Puig, USA Today, hits on some of the misfires: “a failure from start to finish.”

Efforts at humor fall more than flat — they’re tone deaf. The film features a cast of unpleasant wacky caricatures rather than remotely credible humans, led by Kristen Wiig in a variation of her luckless character in Bridesmaids, without a smidgen of that role’s relatability. But where Wiig made indignities comical in that 2011 film, here they mostly feel beneath her.

The story is dull, hollow and almost painful to sit through.

Jan 19

Stop Smoking: “SNL” Spoofs the Prescription of Chantix

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You can stop smoking with nicotine replacement strategies such as the “patch”—or not. Recent research into the attempts of real smokers to quit seems to show that these may not be very effective in the long-term.

This is just one of the latest reports, so common in health-related news, that could leave consumers bewildered. After all, there are many who prefer this method. But let’s face it: smoking, just like any other type of addiction, doesn’t have a one-size-fits-all remedy. Each individual must look at the various options and then decide what might work best for him or her.

Besides nicotine replacement, the options include acupuncture, hypnosis, aversion therapy, and cold turkey, to name just a few.

You can also stop smoking with the prescription of medications—or not. From WebMD: The drug Chantix has been shown to be “an effective way for smokers to kick the habit without resorting to taking nicotine in other forms, according to two new studies.”

How does it work? “It acts at sites in the brain affected by nicotine to do two things: It mimics the effects of nicotine to help stave off cravings and, when used with nicotine, it blocks some of the reinforcing, pleasurable effects of smoking.”

A common course of treatment is 12 weeks, or longer if needed.

Below is a recent Saturday Night Live parody (with Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader) of an ad for Chantix. Note: I present this as a general spoof of drug companies’ warnings about side effects and not as a potential disincentive to stop smoking using whatever methods feel appropriate for you.