Mister Lonely

Since no one makes movies like Harmony Korine, I'm not sure what the standard for critique is. So suffice to say it's really beautiful, unsettling, rambling, and actually kind of spiritual. Love his movies or not he is an honest filmmaker with a true sense of the surreal and the poetry that lurks in the strangest details. The casting is brilliant and the structure unique and pure Korine. The premise is the wacky goings on at a retreat for celebrity and historical impersonators tucked away in (where?) the Scottish Highlands. They are rehearsing a "play" of some kind. It makes for some beautiful moments.

This story is told against another story of nuns who want to jump without parachutes from an airplane to prove the possibility of miracles (as legend claims did happen once) Needless to say this has ripe opportunities,especially when you have Werner Herzog playing the pilot. (Korine says the scene with the man waiting for his wife to return to the airport is an actual caught conversation. THIS you have to see to believe). At the screening I attended, an very odd fan's comment to Korine was simply; "Nuns floating dead on a beach. Awesome image man.Dude you rock". Korine says the two stories are really the same thing. Hmmm - I guess so.

Putting the great, great Samantha Morton together with Herzog, Richard Strange, Leos Carax (Pola X), Anita Pallenberg, Diego Luna, and James Fox - matches any casting coup by John Waters. The story may be criticized as forced and ridiculous, but Korine is willing to take bold chances, to mix it up and. with the help of great actors and wonderful cinematography he create of a work of real cinema poetry.

I see Fellini influences. American Euro Arthouse. Loaded with icons. Fun to watch. Good performances. I liked it.

MISTER LONELY is that sort of film that pleads to be loved. It has an original concept for a plot, it takes many visual and surreal chances, and it is populated with a lovable cast who seem to be having fun with the process. Harmony Korine both wrote (with Avi Korine) and directed this pastiche about people who, frustrated with reality, live their lives as impersonators of famous people. When it works it is delightful: when it gets bogged down with a self-conscious script it falls flat.

'Mister Lonely' (beautifully depicted in the opening sequences under the credits as a child who cannot be what he is told to be) is a young man who takes on the persona of Michael Jackson (Diego Luna), performing dance movements on the streets of Paris as a busker. He encounters a like person who lives impersonating Marilyn Monroe (Samantha Morton) and before long the two are off to a Highlands commune in Scotland, populated with full time impersonators such as a foul-mouthed Abraham Lincoln (Richard Strange), Charlie Chaplin (Denis Lavant), The Pope (James Fox), Father Umbrillo (Werner Herzog), Sammy Davis, Jr. (Jason Pennycooke), the current Queen Elizabeth (Anita Palenberg), Little Red Riding Hood (Rachel Korine), James Dean (Joseph Morgan), Madonna (Melita Morgan), and flying nuns among others. The story is less a plot than a celebration touched with a bit a angst of how the unnoticed people in the world find a source of belonging by embracing imagination.

The film is choppy and loses some of its potential allure from the editing. The cinematography by Marcel Zyskind captures some truly beautiful moments and the musical score by Jason Spaceman with the Sun City Girls adds a lyrical air to this surreal romp. For lovers of Harmony Korine this movie will please. For viewers with limited attention spans (running time is 112 minutes) the film begs indulgence. Grady Harp

Don't be put off by the man's reputation: the film is about dreams, the illusions our selves weave to tangle with things.

The first admission is that the film is the precursor to Trash and Spring but the vision is not refined yet. Contrary to various misconceptions, Korine is not a nihilist, about nothing, though he flirts with provocation. This has all manner of that, in its main thrust however it is about beauty and meaning as much as any Malick.

The provocation is as in his other works about the ways we consume culture, as biting as Godard in his time and at least here as superficial. The image always reflects your view of the thing pictured, so when you perceive superficial things to rail against it's going to be a superficial perception. Here an example is the segment in the retirement home with senile old people gawking at Michael Jackson, one of them tapping his head with a hammer.

Now about the thing that matters here.

The film is centered on people acting roles - in Trash they were pretending to be old people, in Spring it's even more subtle and deep. Here impersonators of cultural icons; Jackson, Marilyn, Chaplin. Among them, Abe Lincoln, Queen Elizabeth and the Pope so he can have opportunity to provoke later on; a Pope who stinks and so on.

So this is about people who are not content to be who they are, who have to adopt an image that lets them go out and do things, opening up a horizon of life as performance with the complexities of self more evident than just people on the street.

Part of the fun is to see the famous faces in all sorts of hijinks, the faces picked because they're so recognizable; Jackson, Marilyn, Chaplin, each one's demons as famous as their glamorous light. But more, it's an opportunity to conjure our preconceptions ahead of us, show the complexity of that image we know: where we expected the neurotic self, we find people doing things, happily drinking in a pond or playing pingpong, where we expected glamorous light, we find the same troubled souls as the rest of us, feeling small or neglected.

It falters for me in that Korine decided to have this play out in a separate stage, a castle in Scotland, removed from life. It is his way of hitting up against the problem: an inner life of dreams as the desire to be someone else, as an escape to a stage that has no life to gracefully perform for no one (seen as a performance they stage for an audience of three people), so in the end when Jackson sheds the artificial self and returns to the world an ordinary guy, we see that it's this world and your own self that has to be lived. (Korine must have realized that if it is to pose a real question, the stage of dreams has to be seen around us, accessible; ordinary middle America in Trash, the this-worldly illusion of Florida.)

So a mild failure from this view, but with hindsight a necessary one to move beyond it. The gamble is to not be stuck grooming a view.

There's a great image here where we see the man cultivate the intuitive reach. In a separate subplot Herzog packs nuns in a plane to fly over the tropics and drop parcels of food, a nun finds herself airborne; the ecstatic rush of sky, the apprehension of god as the swirl of the whole horizon, everywhere light and air.

Well, I don't really understand why Mister Lonely has such a low rate on IMDb.com... I guess that if you go and see an Harmony Korine film you should expect a bit of noncontinuous plot and a considerable touch of black humour. People were laughing all the time yesterday at the cinema, actually it is pretty funny to see the Pope holding a glass of wine in his hand or simply a: man imitating Micheal Jackson riding a tiny motorcycle dragging a monkey puppet that floats in the air... This film has the finest unreal set I've ever seen in a movie (Check the plot summary too get an idea). Even if doesn't have the complexity of Dogville or American Beaty, it's a perfect representation of the eternal question "Who are we?". Are we what we represent? Are we what we try or wish to be? And finally: Is there a god? To be honest, I think that a film about this kind of stuff deserves a decent rate. Also because it is absolutely well crafted and good-looking. It has got everything Korine is all about: weirdness, uncomfortable situations, disappointment and spirituality. If you are in the mood for a proper "art" movie, check it out.