BEFORE: And I've got my theme for the week now, it's something about damaged people who are looking for some kind of redemption, or forgiveness. Which could be everybody, at heart, I'm not really sure. But that's definitely been running through all my movies, the damaged bounty hunters in "The Sisters Brothers", the very damaged man rescuing underage girls from sex rings in "You Were Never Really Here", and John Callahan, damaged in an accident and then looking for a way to forgive others, and himself. Hiccup in "How to Train Your Dragon" also qualifies, of course.
Kristen Wiig carries over from "How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World"
THE PLOT: When Alice Klieg wins the Mega Millions lottery, she immediately quits her psychiatric meds and buys her own talk show.
AFTER: Wow, I think I'm going to have a tough time picking the weirdest movie of 2019, I've seen more than my fair share this year. "Annihilation", "Mother!", "The Box", "Girlfriends Day", "The Great Wall", "Sherlock Gnomes", "Trolls", "Gerald's Game", "A Wrinkle in Time", "The Core", "Enemy", "Tale of Tales", "Shimmer Lake" - they're all in contention, and that's just off the top of my head!
But then again, there's "storytelling weird" and "fantasy weird", and those are two different things. It's reached a point where I can watch a film where Vikings riding on dragons across the ocean seems perfectly normal, as does seeing the Spider-Mans from different universes getting together to defeat a common enemy. It's all relative, I suppose. Talking jungle animals? A bigfoot who wants to meet yetis? A symbiote alien taking over San Francisco? Whatever, man, bring it on. Keep the blog weird. In some ways the weirder they go, the more normalized it all ends up being. But if I say "this was a weird film!" I really have to learn how to be more specific - what was weird about it? Was it a weird way to tell a story, were there weird characters, or was everything just sort of not there for any good reason?
In my roundup I will also need to address the repeated theme of mental illness, as seen in films like "Frank", "Adam", "Welcome to Marwen", "The Beaver", "The Singing Detective", "Wakefield", "The Voices", "Serial Mom", "1922", "Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind", and so on. Those films all had characters with different disorders - so is a guy who communicates through a beaver puppet any stranger than a man who pretends to disappear, only to spy on his family living without him? Or a man who hears voices from his cat, telling him to kill people, where does that fit on the scale? Is a woman who creates her own talk show about herself any different from a man who plays with dolls in a fantasy World War II town "in order to heal"?
I think it's a bit of a narrative shortcut to feature a character with some kind of mental illness, whether that character is a serial killer or just a plain old narcissist - but that's why I'm going to have to check into this further and probably look for another way to break this all down. Addiction, whether that's alcoholism ("Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot") or sex addiction ("Thanks for Sharing"), that's another whole ball of wax, for example. This character in "Welcome to Me" has been diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder, which sounds a lot like a B.S. catch-all when a psychiatrist doesn't know how to classify somebody and just wants to prescribe them some drugs to mellow them out.
I'll admit I don't know much about BPD - part of the problem might be the name of the disorder, it sounds like it's describing someone who's JUST on the verge of being interesting, as in having a personality. But I just looked it up, it's someone who's just a bit more neurotic than your average neurotic person, and is on the edge of becoming psychotic. Theoretically, of course, nobody knows how close someone is to "the edge" until they've gone over it, right? But Wikipedia lists the symptoms of BPD as strong emotional reactions, a distorted sense of self, and feelings of emptiness and abandonment. People who suffer from this may have a long pattern of unstable relationships and may practice self-harm or other dangerous behaviors. Hey, that sounds like just the type of person who should have their own talk show, right?
Because that's what Alice does with her winnings from the California Stack Sweepstakes, she finds an infomercial-making studio that's fallen on hard times and writes them a check for $15 million to make 100 episodes, with the format and details to be worked out later. This is one of those deals where it's not quite clear who's taking advantage of whom, like the owner of the TV studio probably think's he's ripping her off, but she probably can't believe that it only cost her $15 million to have her own show, and have a chance of being the next Oprah.
The show that gets produced comes off like some weird combination of public-access cable and (let's say) Rachael Ray, mixed with an after-school special, and she puts her whole life out there, her thoughts about high-protein diets, her relationship with her parents, her belief that most dogs should be neutered, and then she hires actors to play her during her high-school years, to re-enact that moment when Jordana Spangler betrayed her confidence and embarrassed her in front of the whole school. Before long there's another check written and a model of her living room is built on-stage, turning the whole thing into some kind of low-rent "Truman Show", only her character KNOWS that she's being filmed all the time.
The shows are two hours long, every day, because she's got that kind of cash, and then of course some people start watching, and because it's a train-wreck, they can't turn away and she develops a sort of cult following. A cooking accident leads to a bad accident (there's that tendency to self-harm) but she comes back from it, and keeps making the show until the lawsuits start piling up. Then people start complaining about the on-air dog neutering. See, I knew there had to be a reason why we don't give more talk shows to mental patients...
But this leads to questions, most notably, what would YOU (or I) do if we won the big jackpot? I know my ex-sister-in-law has a thousand really-odd jobs she would hire me for, but my wife would probably do exactly what Alice does in this film, walk into a dog shelter and clear out all the cages. I'm not sure what I would do, put it in the bank and then know that my next however-many vacations were paid for, I guess.
My main NITPICK POINT tonight is basically the same as the one from "It Could Happen to You" - if someone wins the $86 million jackpot, even if there were no other jackpot winners, theyre not going to GET $86 million, half of it's going to taxes right off, and then the rest is going to come in smaller checks for the next 10 or 20 years. Or if they take the quicker payout, then the amount they're going to clear is going to be even smaller. At one point late in the film, Alice is shocked to learn how "little" is left in her bank account - how could she possibly be surprised by this? Was she expecting to still see $86 million there? She would have deposited the check for $40 million, or whatever the amount was she cleared after taxes, so how could she NOT KNOW? I guess maybe she wasn't keeping too close an eye on what she was spending, but still, even a multi-millionaire would probably know how much they have in the bank at any given time.
I also wish the film could have come around to making some kind of point about mental illness that we could use. Is it better to be on the meds or to stop taking them? Should we consider a massive personal fortune as a potential therapy for people with BPD? Should a desire to host a talk show and live in the public eye be treated as a form of mental illness, and could airing that show then be a form of therapy or an alternative to drugs? It's all very unclear.
Also starring James Marsden (last seen in "The Box"), Linda Cardellini (last seen in "Green Book"), Wes Bentley (last seen in "Mission: Impossible - Fallout"), Jennifer Jason Leigh (last seen in "White Boy Rick"), Alan Tudyk (last seen in "Tucker and Dale vs. Evil"), Tim Robbins (last seen in "I.Q."), Joan Cusack (last seen in "The End of the Tour"), Thomas Mann (last seen in "The Stanford Prison Experiment"), Loretta Devine (last heard in Norm of the North"), George Basil, Joyce Hiller Piven, Jack Wallace, Mitch Silpa, with archive footage of Oprah Winfrey (last seen in "Jane Fonda in Five Acts").
RATING: 4 out of 10 carbo-hydrants
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