5 Stars
What if Abraham Lincoln, the Three Stooges, Michael Jackson and Sammy Davis Jr. lived together in a Scottish castle? Harmony Korine, the film world's controversial wunderkind, explores such a surreality in his new movie, Mister Lonely. After nearly a decade long absence from the film circuit, the writer, director, and artist best known for Gummo and Kids, has returned to gift the world a strange and beautiful tale about the relationship between dreams and identity.
The movie follows the life of a forlorn Michael Jackson impersonator, played by Diego Luna, struggling to make ends meet by performing dance numbers in the streets of Paris. After meeting a Marilyn Monroe, he agrees to follow her back to an impersonator's commune in the Scottish Highlands. There, among a bevy of other celebrity and historical figures, Michael begins to realize that even in escape there are often traces of confinement. The secondary storyline that drops in sporadically, one might even say, like a nun falling from the sky, is equally absurd. Werner Herzog, Korine's long time mentor and admirer, makes a striking appearance as a priest in charge of a Latin American convent. Watching over his divine flock of nuns, Herzog offers his heavy-but-compassionate hand with the spiritual undertones of the film.
From start to finish, Mister Lonely is a breathtaking piece of cinema. The quiet absurdity of a chicken-loving Buckwheat riding ponies through fairy tale pastures, or the Queen pillow-talking with the Pope, left me gasping for air between violent rolls of laughter. At the same time, I felt my throat tighten with a genuine sorrow in the moments I watched reality invade even the most well fortified of Neverlands. What's more, the juxtaposition of the lush green of the jungle, and the misty grey of the Highlands, works brilliantly with the bright punctuations of a nun's blue habit or Red Riding Hood's cloak.
In many ways, Mister Lonely is an impersonator itself - mimicking the motions of the greatest cartoons, thrillers, abstractions, and dramas that its medium has ever produced. While disjointed and incomprehensible at some points, the whole is cohesive and round, filled to capacity with color and surprise. As the Queen of England explains to an empty audience near the film's conclusion, we impersonate others to keep a sense of wonder alive in the world. Mister Lonely, impersonating in its own way, certainly succeeds in this pursuit.
