May 07, 2008
Mister Lonely
Escape to Neverland
Paul McCartney famously awoke from a dream with the melody of what would become “Yesterday” running through his head. Luckily for us, he had the foresight to modify the lyrics from his dream: “Scrambled eggs/Oh, you’ve got such lovely legs.” Harmony Korine’s Mister Lonely is so inundated with the imagery of the subconscious that he seems to have written and shot it as he dreamed. Its style and movement has all the qualities of the kinds of dreams which remain with us for years: powerful, absurd, beautiful, disturbing, and often hard to understand.
The film follows a Michael Jackson impersonator, played by Diego Luna, from Paris to a remote castle in the Scottish Highlands, where he follows a faux–Marilyn Monroe (Samantha Morton) to live in a commune for impersonators: her husband, Charlie Chaplin (Denis Lavant) and young daughter, Shirley Temple, along with the Pope, Madonna, the Queen of England, Little Red Riding Hood, Sammy Davis Jr., Abe Lincoln, Buckwheat, the Three Stooges, and James Dean. The misty medieval setting would be haunting no matter who was living there; add this cast of characters, and each scene is like a Surrealist painting. We may be able to imagine a Michael Jackson impersonator dancing, as Luna does in the first scene, for tourists in the Place de la Bastille, but only our subconscious would place Madonna, in a full “Blonde Ambition” bodice and knee-high rubber boots, slugging through a sheep pasture. Much of Mister Lonely is composed of slice-of-life-at-the-castle vignettes, any of which could be a recap of a dream over breakfast the next morning: Madonna hides her face in James Dean’s sweater as the Three Stooges shoot a herd of infected sheep in the pasture. Abe Lincoln takes Michael Jackson into town on the back of his moped. A sobbing Pope is scrubbed clean by Buckwheat in a tub in the middle of a field. Even the most mundane scenes are magical and frightening, since their vocabulary is one we’re each familiar with on such a personal, usually hidden, level.
There is a loose plot at the castle: Michael, played by Luna with irresistible innocence, loves Marilyn. Morton does almost too much justic to Marilyn Monroe; the impenetrable fact is that she’s a better actress than Monroe ever was. An intelligence seeps out from behind her breathy, giggling Marilyn impression, and a profound sadness. Denis Lavant, as Marilyn’s jealous husband Charlie Chaplin, provides the threat of violence which reminds us that this is still a Harmony Korine movie, despite its drastically uncharacteristic subject matter. Kids, which he wrote, and Gummo, which he wrote and directed, are deeply entrenched in everyday life; Korine is the poster boy for the nitty-gritty, hard to watch, peering-in-at-the-underbelly-of-America genre of independent film that makes Mister Lonely seem like Fassbinder trying his hand at a romantic comedy. You can take the man out of the dingy alleys, apparently, but— well, we never entirely buy Marilyn’s chirpy proclamation that their commune is a place where everyone loves and accepts one another. As the characters’ costumes hide their true identities (we are never told anyone’s real name), so do their idyllic surroundings hide something dangerous beneath the surface. Often when we wake, not knowing whether the dream we just had was good or bad, just strange, it’s the dark moments that ultimately stay with us.
Mister Lonely is not just a dream; it’s a dream sequence. Interspersed with the story of the commune is the story of missionaries in an unnamed South American country— three or four nuns and a priest, played by Werner Herzog— who drop food from planes over impoverished villages. After a nun falls out of the plane and lands safely on the ground, the story becomes the story of her miracle. It’s hard to know what connection Korine wants us to draw between the movie's two halves, only that he wants us to draw one. For this viewer, the strongest connection was the dreamlike quality of this story, like the first one. Korine seems to have an uncanny ability to tap into the language of the unconscious, the way events unfold and the causality that’s implied in dreams, the gaps in logic our mind allows itself. The story of the nuns should be told, like another breakfast table play-by-play, in ellipses: “We were somewhere in South America… Werner Herzog was the priest (Werner Herzog!)… one of the nuns fell, for what seemed like years, and landed unscathed.”
The film ends with the conclusion of the nun’s story, a harsh slap in the face which could only be seen as the act of waking up. Michael’s ending is equally jarring, and seems millions of miles away from the castle and the people there. It will be interesting to see where Korine goes from here— maybe Mister Lonely, a fascinating if flawed departure from his territory, was just a reverie before he returns to the drudgery of the everyday.
