Movie Review: Mister Lonely

By Tasha Robinson, Special to the Chicago Tribune

2-1/2 stars

In his visually and emotionally exhausting previous films, "Gummo" and "Julien Donkey-Boy," writer-director Harmony Korine reveled in dysfunction. His subjects - a frantic schizophrenic in "Julien," a run-down town full of bored, angry kids in "Gummo" - were ugly, disturbed people, and he accordingly shot them in ugly, disturbing ways, designed to jangle nerves and set teeth on edge.

With his latest, "Mister Lonely," Korine sets out to soothe those nerves with gorgeous honeyed images and a profound sense of tranquillity. The people he's examining are still problematic outsiders, but this time out, Korine chooses to make them beautiful as well as discomfiting.

Diego Luna stars as a Michael Jackson impersonator taking small-time performance jobs and working the streets of Paris; like much of the rest of the cast, his character is never identified by name. When he falls in with a Marilyn Monroe impersonator (played with an appropriately Monroe-esque bruised grace by Samantha Morton), they call each other solely by the names of the people they're pretending to be. Together, they head back to her remote Scottish commune, where other impersonators live in costume and character full time; when she presents him by announcing "I found a Michael," the nature of the place, as a sort of glass menagerie of the faux-famous, becomes abundantly clear. Heavy-handed speeches emphasize the appeal of taking up another's persona as a mask, but the explanations are shallow and unnecessary compared with the gloriously outre images.

Korine never scratches the surface of these strange, damaged people or the individual choices that took them away from the world and their own identities. Instead, he creates a loose, plotless pageant of pop images, set in a surrealistic bubble where a foul-mouthed Abe Lincoln drives a tractor, the Three Stooges torment him with paint, and the pope and Queen Elizabeth II lie in bed together, exhausted, at the end of a long day. In the same vein, "Mister Lonely" includes another, entirely unrelated plotline involving a group of nuns who smoke, dance in circles in the rain and go skydiving with bicycles, apparently just because Korine likes how it looks on film.

It's all unabashedly self-indulgent. Korine falls so thoroughly in love with many of his images, including his opening shot, that he stretches them out in hypnotic slow motion. He casts his wife as Little Red Riding Hood and co-wrote the script with his brother. He brings in other filmmakers for small roles: Leos Carax as "Michael's" agent, Werner Herzog (who had a larger role in "Julien") as a talkative priest.

But where the self-indulgence of Korine's past films was bent on excruciating voyeurism, forcing viewers to endure extended family fights and gleeful cat-corpse mutilation sessions, "Mister Lonely" invites its audience to watch people who are blissfully happy to be watched and who live their lives hoping to be seen. Korine neglects to explain where they get the money to live in a richly appointed castle, and the free time to lounge about all day, arranging themselves in artfully weird tableaux, but the results are undeniably haunting, a Peter Greenaway-esque collection of colorful collages with a sweet, melancholy tinge.

Like so many lovely cinematic dreams, "Mister Lonely" inevitably descends into nightmare, with an unsettlingly grim conclusion that, again, seems more imagistic than idea-driven. And it never finds any particular coherence or depth as a story. Nonetheless, its whimsy and sad-clown antics make for a memorable cinematic version of a Dada coffee table art-book. And in adding a pretty gloss to his collection of favored freaks, Korine has made them a thousand times more palatable and populist.

No MPAA rating; parents cautioned for profanity, sexual situations and grim content.

Running time: 1:52.

Starring: Diego Luna (Michael Jackson); Samantha Morton (Marilyn Monroe); Denis Lavant (Charlie Chaplin); Werner Herzog (Father Umbrillo).

Directed by Harmony Korine; written by Harmony Korine and Avi Korine; edited by Paul Zucker and Valdis Oskarsdottir; photographed by Marcel Zyskind; music by Jason Spaceman and The Sun City Girls; production design by Richard Campling; produced by Nadja Romain. An IFC Films release.