He Kids You Not

Harmony Korine's Mister Lonely has something to say, even if we don't understand it.

by Sam Adams

THRILL 'ER: "Michael Jackson" (Diego Luna) hits it off with "Marilyn Monroe" (Samantha Morton). (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

It's important to know, right up front, that Harmony Korine means it. Mister Lonely, the first movie he has directed in eight years, is so full of bizarre characters, strange situations, and nigh-inexplicable parallels that it might be tempting to label it a kind of outlaw-cinema endurance test. But if you've talked to Korine, as I did at the time of julien donkey-boy's 1999 release, it's clear that his weird, disordered and occasionally opaque movies are genuine attempts to put forth a view of the world and his chosen art form. Sincerity in itself is no defense; just because a filmmaker thinks he has something to say doesn't mean that he does, or that he knows how to say it. But whatever else you call Mister Lonely, you can't call it calculated, or cynical, or even — no matter how tempting — contrived. He means it, whatever it is.

Mister Lonely's principle story (there are two) is set on a commune whose residents are celebrity impersonators. There's a Charlie Chaplin, a Madonna (in her pointy bustier phase), Three Stooges, even an exceptionally foul-mouthed Lincoln. The commune's residents never shed their costumes and never acknowledge any identity other than the one they've adopted. They don't act; they are.

"How long have you lived as Michael Jackson?" asks Marilyn Monroe (Samantha Morton) when she meets Diego Luna in Paris. Straight hair falling to his shoulders, his fingertips circled by white tape, Luna looks not unlike Jackson did in the early '90s, and he has the moves and the high-voiced "whoo-hoo" down pat. But neither Michael nor Marilyn make much effort to impersonate their chosen icons in the conventional sense. Morton sports a white dress like the one Monroe wore in The Seven-Year Itch, but her voice is her own Nottingham alto and not Monroe's breathy sigh. Luna's personality suits his chosen mode: He is timid and shy, sweet but unformed. Morton, despite her garb, plays Monroe as she was offscreen: pretty, downcast and unutterably sad.

Marilyn persuades Michael to move to her commune in the Scottish Highlands, where he runs afoul of her husband, Charlie (Denis Lavant, who seems, inexplicably, to be doing an Italian accent). His Little Tramp getup notwithstanding, Charlie is a gruff, abrasive chap, fond of rough sex and instantly suspicious of Michael's relationship with his wife. Although Marilyn paints the commune as an idyllic place where "everyone is famous and no one ever dies," there is constant friction and little in the way of communal spirit. (In his director's statement, Korine says the commune is inspired by the one he was raised on, although he has a habit of fabricating biographical details to keep himself amused and ensnare unwary journalists.)

When he's not following life on the commune, Korine cuts away to the Paraguayan jungle, where a missionary played by Werner Herzog is leading an airborne relief mission. As he screams instructions from the plane's cockpit, blue-habited nuns toss bags of rice down on unsuspecting villagers, until one slips out the plane's door and begins plummeting to earth. Saved by prayer, she miraculously survives the landing and advises her fellow sisters to accept the ultimate test of faith. Soon the air is filled with skydiving nuns, single and in packs, and in one case with a dirt bike clamped between her legs.

Korine likes to say he thinks in images, and Mister Lonely has moments of mysterious beauty, filmed by Marcel Zyskind, who has shot several movies for Michael Winterbottom. The movie opens with a hypnotic slow-motion shot in which Michael rides a tiny yellow motorcycle around a track, a stuffed monkey with wings bouncing in his wake. When Michael is at his lowest ebb, he returns to his room and paints human faces on hard-boiled eggs, which then address him in speech and in song. Whether or not Korine, as he has claimed, took up egg-painting during one of his more prolonged periods of heavy drug use (there have, by all accounts, been quite a few), the sight of a Mexican Michael Jackson taking solace from a row of singing eggs is wondrous and absurd and unlikely to vanish from your memory anytime soon. As to what it means, well, good luck with that.

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

Mister Lonely

Directed by Harmony Korine

An IFC Films release