With Welcome to Me, director Shira Piven and star Kristen Wiig ride a fine line. It’s a depiction of mental illness that manages to make you laugh without ever being offensive, and it’s by far Wiig’s most thought-provoking performance to date. She plays Alice Klieg, a small-town woman obsessed with television and showbiz (she worships Oprah on a daily basis on VHS tapes she’s memorized word for word). When she wins 85 million bucks in a lottery, she grabs her dream by the throat, throwing oodles of cash at a local broadcast company to produce and beam out her very own show, “Welcome to Me.” She’s mentally unstable, though, and when she quits her psychiatric meds, she begins to wobble off the rails, a full-on train wreck surely on her horizon.

In her sophomore feature, Piven’s crafted a film that’s deceptively elegant in its earnestness; a comedy on the surface, a piercing observation piece at its core. In a press roundtable interview, I spoke to Piven about the film’s subtleties, Wiig’s performance, and the tricky business of portraying mental illness on-screen.

Mental illness are stigmatized in society. How did that affect your approach?
If your main character is mentally ill, you have to tread lightly and very sensitively. For me, there are two things that come to mind. One is, it’s important to separate the person from the diagnosis. Two, [you have to be] really respectful and never laugh at the mental illness or the person, exactly. There’s a lot of humor in this movie, but me and Kristen felt that we want to laugh because the situation is absurd. Alice is a real person in a real world. I love her and I love the script because she’s someone who we recognize. I feel like we all know Alice, or we are Alice in some way. We have to give her dignity. I also think, on a social level, it’s more and more important that we become more open about mental illness, that it’s not stigmatized and marginalized.

I think we’re conditioned to accept portrayals of mental illness in movies a certain way. They’re often caricatures. Kristen doesn’t do that here, though, and I don’t think many other actors have the skill required to walk the fine line she does here.
Yeah, I think it really is a fine line. I sometimes like to call her performances a little bit death-defying, like a high-wire act. But it’s also how we cut the performance together in the edit room; creating a performance for film is a tricky business, and it’s a collaboration between the writer, the performer and the director. I feel like if you take all the things I said into account of being respectful of the mental illness and treating the script with sensitivity and allowing the actress to be who she is, hopefully the collision of those things will come out well. I think it’s so funny at moments—Alice is hilarious—but she doesn’t know she’s hilarious. She’s just living her life. We laugh in recognition.

For me, it was important to cast an actress with a basic comic center. I feel like she lives and breathes in that comic center, but she also has a vulnerable side. She can go to those dark places, darker than I imagined she could as an actress.

Darker than you intended?
Not intended, but she goes to places in this movie she’s never gone before. So I’m not gonna say, “Could you audition for me and show me that you can go there?” She did it so honestly and beautifully.

Was Kristen in mind for the character?
The script wasn’t written with her in mind, but she was my first choice. There were a lot of ideas floating around for actresses, and initially I thought a lot about Joan Cusack. She was kind of a muse for this character in my mind. I think Joan and Kristen have similar sensibilities. There was a boardroom scene where Joan Cusack, Kristen Wiig, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Wes Bentley and James Marsden are all together, and it was really fun. They were excited to work together.

I like that Alice has a distinct look: her fanny pack, the way her apartment is decorated. When did that vision come together?
The fanny pack was in the script, but I had this vision of how she should look. Kristen and I agreed on the heart of the character, but we didn’t necessarily agree on how she looked at first. I think Kristen thought Alice would look a little more realistic and plain, and I felt Alice was a little bit of a heightened character. I didn’t want her to play her in a heightened way, but I saw her in colorful dresses that might be from the ’40s or the ’50s. I felt like she shopped in thrift stores. The costume designer, Susan Matheson, agreed with me. “She would shop in Palm Desert thrift stores! She’s a desert flower!” She came up with this orange terrycloth dress. Kristen was eventually won over by these ideas and embraced them.

Something that came to mind for me was that a personality like Alice wouldn’t need a cent of that 85 million dollars to be successful on Youtube. Was that in mind for the movie’s ending?
Yes, in a way. It’s funny, we found some interesting people on Youtube when we were in pre-production. There are some amazing Youtubers going off in a similar way to Alice. I hate to talk about the end of the movie because it’s so open to interpretation, but it goes back to James Marsden’s line when he says, “She wants to be televised.” And Gabe (Bentley) knows she’s found this form of expression, as narcissistic as it might be, so he gives her a camera.

I read that this was originally a TV pilot.
I think Eliot Laurence (the screenwriter) was hoping for it to be a Showtime or HBO series, but when I read it, I felt I was reading a screenplay. I felt obsessed with it being a movie. I didn’t even know if I was giving him good advice or not, but I said, “Would you like to rewrite this as a screenplay?” He was thrilled with the idea.

Could you talk about what it was like shooting the dog neutering scene?
The dog neutering was a little like life imitating art. We had a lot of meetings about dog neutering. [laughs] It was some big conundrum of how to do this. We had a vet tech on set who was advising us and brilliant prop people. The prop people got these amazing props that looked incredibly real, and Kristen had these delicate hands; she really did the surgery. The surgery looked really good, but at one point we had the vet tech—who had similar hands, amazingly—come in and do some of the really exacting surgical stuff. We had some taxidermy dogs we filmed. The dog wrangler, who was fantastic, said she could get Alice’s dog to play dead on the table, and she did!

I’ve been asking everybody about this because I’m kind of obsessed: I think not enough attention is given to actors who act with their bodies. When you see Academy Awards clips, they always show actors yelling in a small room, or crying. Kristen tells stories with her body very well. Can you talk about her physical performance?
That’s cool! Such a great observation. I love it. I come from a theater background, and on stage you can’t just be a talking head. Really good actresses have intense physical training. She’s very in her body. Even in the first scene when she’s watching Oprah, you can see her just leaning into the TV. One of my favorite physical moments was a scene where she’s listening to her theme song. She’s supposed to just be lying around, listening, but I thought it would be really great if she did that dancing we do when we’re alone in our apartment. I thought Kristen would be great at that. That was just delightful.

I think it’s really haunting the way she walks through the casino in that pivotal scene.
That’s an even better example, because she’s not doing movement, per se, but just owning the space she’s in in an incredible way.

Before Alice wins the money, she has a very scheduled existence. After she wins the money, she throws all that to the wind. Part of it has to do with the meds, but what about the money made her throw away her routine?
That’s where the teeny hint of fairy tale comes in. She has this lonely life, going to a convenience store to get her pudding and issue of O magazine. I think Alice is someone who fantasized about what she’d do when her ship came in. Her ship comes in, and she just goes for it, takes that leap off the bridge. Her apartment is still there, with her sleeping bag and the whole thing, but I think she takes that leap of faith. That’s what makes it a great story, in a way, because we all fantasize about that leap of faith, and she does it. She inspires people around her, and I think Gabe sees her just going whole-hog for what she’s going to do. Even though everyone’s trying to stop her and she unravels and it’s a big mess, it says something about the dangers of following that narcissistic path, but she’s also inspiring at the same time.

Was there any improvisation involved in the film?
There was a lot of improvisation. We definitely shot the script and got everything we wanted from the script. We didn’t use whole new setups for the improvisation, but we used the setups we were in and had them riff within it. I would throw lines or ideas out for an alternate moment, and Elliot would sometimes hand rewrites to Kristen. She trusted him so much because she really loved the writing. I think her prepared statement in the casino was one of those alternate takes he wrote on the fly. She and Tim Robbins improvised the banana moment.

Joan Cusack has one of my favorite movie voices of all time. I could listen to her talk all day. Tim Robbins, too. I love the way Joan says “baby” to Alice in studio.
I’ve known Tim since I was 24 years old and I’ve known Joan since we were 8 years old. They’re both kind of heroes of mine. They’re friends, but they’re both people who I creatively admire so much.

Do you think Alice and Gabe’s relationship goes anywhere?
I think people like Alice with borderline personality disorder who have relationships…they have to have a devoted partner. It’s an unpredictable roller coaster, and I think Gabe is limited in his own way. I think they’ve found a match in each other, but it’s always hard to say how it’s going to turn out. One of the great lines is when Gabe says, “I’ve been divorced twice. And by twice I mean three times.” We hope for them.

There’s something poetically comical about self-help jargon escaping the mouths of the world’s least qualified advice givers. Most recently Jake Gyllenhaal’s Lou Bloom in Nightcrawler dispensed memorized wisdom while in the throes of sincere depravity. Now we have Alice Klieg, plagued by borderline personality disorder and well versed in Oprah-ese. Off and on on her medications, she spends her days in her color coded house watching hours of recorded talk shows, reciting along with their hosts all the life enhancing mumbo jumbo that daytime TV can offer. Kristen Wiig plays Alice’s mentally unsound and painfully awkward protagonist, and it’s because of her this film doesn’t end up feeling mean hearted, since Alice’s behavior make for some serious laughs at the expense of mental disease and the people who take advantage of an unwell woman. Because of Wiig’s charm and the line-toeing nuance of Eliot Laurence’s script, Welcome to Me explores the larger themes of self-medication and personal treatment and how artistry and imagination plays into finding a middle ground where one can at least live a satisfying life if not one defined as “normal.”

Alice lives a life of routine. She sleeps in a sleeping bag above her bed covers, her TV is not allowed to turn off and constantly plays a slew of her favorite Oprah episodes, and every day she buys herself a lottery ticket. One day her numbers match and her life is changed. Alice is functional enough to understand money can change your life. So, along with her best friend Gina (Linda Cardellini) she starts to have some fun. She moves into a penthouse in a Palm Springs hotel, buys herself colorful clothing, and treats her friends and family to expensive meals, among them her supportive gay ex-husband (Alan Tudyk). When she and Gina serve as audience members in an infomercial and Alice gets to be on stage in front of the camera, she finds a new high to achieve to. And with money, she doesn’t even have to try that hard.

Gabe and Rich (Wes Bentley and James Marsden) are the brothers who own the studio where Alice visited the informercial and their business is dying. When Alice marches in and lays down cash to buy herself a weekly two hour talk show, Rich agrees immediately, while Gabe seems to understand Alice’s demands come from someplace unhinged. And so Welcome to Me is born, much to the annoyance of the studio’s producers (Jennifer Jason Leigh and Joan Cusack). Alice’s terms are met in detail, so her show has her coming in on a swan, she spends portions of the show cooking low-“carbohydrant” meals (she’s convinced herself a high protein diet will aid in her therapy), and most awkwardly of all she directs elaborate reenactments of the most distressing and humiliating moments from her life in an attempt to get the last word.

It’s all quite hilarious, even if you aren’t sure at every moment if you ought to be laughing. And when Alice throws more and more money into the show to up its production value and glorify herself, her narcissism and blatant use of others starts to take its toll. Her downward spiral into her disease in the end is much grittier than expected, given the lightness up until then, but in that way it very effectively expresses the highs and lows of borderline personality disorder. It’s volatile and uncomfortable.

Wiig has proved she’s branching out past the safe humor of SNL, riding the dramedy line in such films as Hateship Loveship and The Skeleton Twins. Her deadpan sincerity to her roles adds the dramatic seriousness needed, but only in Welcome to Me do I feel we’re really seeing the vulnerability she’s capable of. Not to mention her ability to so quickly go from Alice’s hissy fit style hysteria when talking about past wrongs to calculated monotone-delivered speeches on reaching one’s personal potential. Her range has never been more evident.

Director Shira Piven, relatively unknown with only one other feature and a TV documentary under her belt, most proves her abilities in the performances of her actors, allowing their talent to play out. Bentley especially impresses as a shy and rather broken man who joins Alice in finding personal therapy. With its bright coloring and Gondry-esque TV set Piven’s world in Welcome to Me is a bit exaggerated, which may draw away from the gravity of Alice’s condition, but never seems to make light of it. Much like Alice’s zen-like therapist played by Tim Robbins, Piven creates a safe place to explore.

It’s not too far fetched to believe if we say our mantras and layer on the systems, something will catch and we may just fix ourselves. Its why those who buy one self-help book are the most likely to buy another. Welcome to Me touches on a need in all of us to try to reach some level of self-proclaimed normalcy as well as the innate need to feel accepted by others for all our flaws and quirks. Borderline personality disorder is mostly a heightened emotional state and a distorted sense of self-image, and I doubt there’s anyone out there who can’t identify to some degree with what Alice feels. Mental illness is no laughing matter, but therapy absolutely is, and this film’s strength lies in Alice as the face of what we’re all searching for—and that the seemingly-put-together life gurus just don’t imbue—someone searching for help who actually looks like they need it.

Jack Black is one of the most hit and miss actors working today. Without a doubt he can knock it out of the park, in both hilarious supporting roles and serious leads. But for every Bernie there is a Gullivers Travels. Still, there is something about his manic energy that lends his every role a certain watchability.

For his first big headliner of 2015, Black is hopping on The D Train, a comedy that popped up at Sundance and sees its first trailer debut today.

The D Train stars Black as Dan, a perpetually uncool dude struggling to put together the perfect high school reunion, only to find that no one wants to show. His solution might just lie with his polar opposite, Oliver Lawless (James Marsden), the face of a national commercial. But when Lawless agrees to return home for the reunion, Dan watches his life get quickly taken over by his new pal.

Written and directed by Andrew Mogel and Jarrad Paul (the writing duo behind Yes Man), the film co-stars the ever-hilarious Kathryn Hahn (She’s Funny That Way, Parks and Rec) and Jeffery Tambor (Arrested Development, Transparent).

So far The D Train has chalked up mixed buzz, but the Black/Marsden team up holds a lot of potential. Check out the trailer below.

It’s been nearly a decade since Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy introduced Will Ferrell and director Adam McKay’s (then a newcomer) absurdist brand of humor to the masses, a brand of humor that earned the film the biggest cult following for a comedy since perhaps Caddyshack and lived on in McKay’s subsequent (mildly less successful) films Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, Step Brothers, and The Other Guys (all starring Ferrell). In Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues, McKay and his now-way-more-famous cast return with a bigger, broader, less memorable chapter in Burgundy’s story. The laughs still hit hard (I was bowled over quite frequently) and the wonderful cast is as sharp and witty as ever, but multiple, needlessly inflated, disposable plotlines drag the film down, and the novelty of McKay’s unfettered randomness has all but worn off in the last ten years.

It’s 1980, and happily married newscasters Ron Burgundy (Ferrell) and Veronica Corningstone (Christina Applegate, as beautiful and quick as ever) arrive at an impasse when Veronica beats Ron out for a coveted position at the news station and their boss (Harrison Ford) rips Ron’s job away (in Ford’s signature callous growl). Brimming with jealous rage, Ron leaves his wife and son (one of the worst child actors I’ve seen this year) and tracks down his old news crew to start a new career path at GNN, a news network in New York, where they help to pioneer a revolutionary concept called “24-hour news” (yuck yuck).

Returning are Steve Carrell as weatherman Brick Tamland, an extreme representation of McKay’s affinity for random dialog; Paul Rudd as reporter Brian Fantana, the embodiment of faux, cologne-collector machismo; and David Koechner as sportscaster Champ Kind, an ambiguously rape-y pervert with a hilariously uncomfortable affection for Ron (long, dick-to-dick hugs). Ron and his brigade are met with fierce hostility in New York, dished out by rival hot-shot anchor Jack Lime (James Marsden, surprisingly very funny) and their alpha-female station manager (Meagan Good). With everything stacked against him (including a miserable 2am time slot), Ron stands stubbornly determined to out-career Veronica, and finds his path to success in the form of the trashy, nothing-news we’re now oh-so familiar with in 2013 (in a stroke of “brilliance”, Ron reports on a car chase and sticks with the pursuit until the perp is caught, earning him sky-high ratings).

The satire is half-baked, laid on thick, and isn’t handled with nearly the deftness of the small, zingy, hyperbolic moments Anchorman is adored for. Narratively, the movie is a mess, with a tangle of plots and sub-plots that are so conventional and uninteresting that they bog down the film’s free-flowing, improv-is-king spirit. Veronica finds a new man (Greg Kinnear); Ron’s career focus has made him an absentee father; Brick’s found a love interest (Kristen Wiig, who merely mimics Carrell’s character, disappointingly); Ron’s success gets to his head and shuns his friends; etc. It all feels too conventional and schematic, and McKay spends an inordinate amount of time fleshing these story lines out, when all we really want to see are the gags. The crowded narrative feels restrictive, barring the talent from letting loose as much as they want to.

The good news is (yes, I said it!), the funnies are as tangential, out-of-left-field, and irreverent as the first film’s, if not more. You won’t find many über-repeatable one-liners here, but there are some scenes that absolutely kill. In perhaps the most interesting narrative thread in the film (really), Ron and his family befriend a shark named Doby and sing a 2-minute-long tribute musical number in his honor that had me rumbling so hard my throat was on fire (no one else in the theater found it as found it as funny, but hey…different strokes). McKay’s sense of timing is excellent; in one scene, Ron and his team begin laughing uproariously at a throwaway joke, and then McKay awkwardly cuts–right in the middle of their guffawing–to them standing in utter silence. Again, it’s an unquotable moment, but it’s funny as hell.

McKay takes the most bizarre, out-there scene from the first film–the incredible news anchor gang fight–and recycles it here (with the expected parade of super-celeb cameos). What’s fascinating is, now that we’re so familiarized with McKay’s comedic style, the scene feels safe, redundant, unsurprising, and dull, though it still has baseline entertainment value. I wouldn’t say Anchorman 2 is an unnecessary sequel–it’s still a lot of fun to watch these guys flex their comedic muscles–but it simply doesn’t measure up to the legendary (yes…I said it!) stature of its predecessor. Unfortunately, if this sequel is an indication of a downward trend in quality for the franchise, the forecast for Ron Burgundy’s future (okay, now I’m just being stupid) looks pretty cloudy (sorry).

Robot & Frank is a sentimental buddy-movie between two unlikely people; well, technically just one as the other is a robot as the title suggests. It is a simple story that aims to entertain and satisfy the audience rather than explore some of the serious issues it introduces. In the end, the film felt like it set its aspirations bit too low, but if you are willing to do the same, it can be a tolerable light spirited film.

Set in Cold Spring, New York in the near future, an older man named Frank (Frank Langella) is slowly showing signs of dementia. Frank is an ex-jewel thief who still stores most of his valuables in a secret safe behind a picture on the wall of his house where he resides alone. Because he absolutely refuses to go to a “brain center” or any kind of retirement home, Frank’s son Hunter (James Marsden) decides to get his father a robot to help him out around the house, like a butler.

To say that Frank is very put-off by his new robot would be a gross understatement. At first, he does not believe the robot (voiced by Peter Sarsgaard) will benefit him at all and figures it might just murder him in his sleep. Beyond just the fact that Frank is an elder who is resisting to rely on new technologies, a common thing among older people, but embracing this new butler also means that Frank would indirectly admit that he has a problem and needs help, which he does not believe he has. On his side for political reasons, is his daughter Madison (Liv Tyler) who plays a hippie that is opposed of robot slavery. But his view changes when Frank looks at the robot as an accomplice rather than a caretaker.

Because Frank has no choice but to accept the robot, he does so by putting it to work for him, just not in the way Hunter envisioned. Frank begins to teach the robot on how to assist him on his future heists by showing the robot how to pick locks and how to bypass traditional security measures. Just as they start to form a bond together, an opportunity arises where the pair can put their teamwork to use. A librarian that Frank has had his eye on for a while named Jennifer (Susan Sarandon) is distraught when the new library owner decides all of the books will be replaced with digital additions. Some view the plan to recycle all of the traditional books as throwing them away, thus Frank has his robot go to work to “save” one that means a lot to Jennifer.

The frustrating part about Robot & Frank is how the film chose to stay within the lines and playing out exactly how you think it will. It is essentially a classic tale of a stubborn man who wants nothing to do with his new robot but eventually befriends it and defends it when threatened to be taking away. The problem is there was more potential in Christopher Ford’s script that was severely underused. Dependency on technology, political views on robot slaves, and the demise of text-book literacy were all hinted at, but unfortunately, not fully explored.

Frank Langella appears in every scene, and handles the task well for the most part. Some of his lines feel a little off at times, like when he says the robot is “cramping his style”. The rest of the cast is too clichéd to be memorable. Jeremy Strong who plays the villain of the new snobby library owner, comes off as a laughable character who probably was not intended to be. Strong is almost always over-the-top with his delivery and is more distracting than anything else.

Because the film holds your hand the entire way through – something that it could have deviated from at times – Robot & Frank ends up largely being a film that was too carefully setup and executed to be anything beyond a safe crowd pleaser. But since being a crowd pleasing film was the intention of the film, it cannot be faulted for carrying out its design. The aim to leave the audience satisfied is evident throughout but especially in the end where a plot twist could have been worked as a bone-chilling yet emotional impacting moment that the film instead opts to keep low-key and lighthearted. Changing the direction that the film should have gone would be labeled as a personal preference; and one that I would have preferred.

There is no denying that the indie Sundance Film Festival winner Robot and Frank looks intriguing. While it still looks like it is a heartwarming tale of robot companionship, it appears to put a little bit of a spin on the over-used formula. The film stars Frank Langella (Frost/Nixon), who appears to have a fairly stand out performance, alongside James Marsden (X-Men) and Liv Tyler (Lord of the Rings, The Strangers).

An ex-jewel thief named Frank receives a robotic caretaker from his children in lieu of moving into a retirement home. Frank is reluctant towards the butler robot at first but eventually begins to bond with the machine. He especially grows close to him once he finds out that he can teach it how to pick a lock and become a partner in crime.

Robot and Frank has a limited theatrical release on August 24th, 2012.

Watch the official trailer for Robot and Frank: