The opening sequence of Harmony Korine’s Mister Lonely is transcendent, pure cinema. The moment it ended (with a cut to a close-up in a dingy Paris office), I was hopeful to spend the next 110 minutes experiencing an overlooked gem of a film.
The remainder of the first third of the film maintained my hope. Diego Luna is surprisingly effective as a Michael Jackson impersonator in Paris. Like our expectation of the real MJ, Luna’s character is a kind of wonder-eyed man-boy who is surrounded by society without actually being a part if it (the film debuted at Cannes 2 years prior to the singer’s sudden death). The moment “Michael” runs into a Marilyn Monroe impersonator (played by the supremely talented Samantha Morton), the potential that Mister Lonely would provide an engaging, off-beat character study was high.
But then “Marilyn” takes “Michael” to live with her at a celebrity impersonator commune in (of course) a castle in the Scottish highlands, and I quickly began to imagine a boardroom chart in which the film’s self-indulgent pretention steadily rises as the film’s quality plummets. And this is all without full contemplation of the part I haven’t even mentioned yet: the extraneous sideline story of “Father” Werner Herzog and his skydiving nuns.
Now, some people might uniformly reject subconscious, non-narrative flimmaking, but I do not. But, for that type of cinematic exercise to work, there has to be something unifying, usually the emotional component or a larger, provocative set of ideas. Given what a waste of potential the film turns out to be, it is no surprise that in the DVD interview, Korine essentially describes the film as being the result of a disparate set of images that he had in his head. His brother and co-screenwriter Avi Korine provides an explanation for why this commune would exists, and I’m not convinced that he was describing, or perhaps had even seen, the film I had just watched. To be kind, the strange delivery devices, and even the priest and nuns sidebar, are potentially fertile ground for the cultivating of ideas and emotions. But to the extent such things can be gleaned, they are not the result of any intent or discipline of or by the filmmakers. As someone who rather admired Gummo and Julien Donkey-Boy, I hope that Korine snaps out of his funk and makes a good movie again.
Here are this morning’s Oscar-nominated films, alphabetically. The nominees for foreign language film and documentary feature are compiled at the end of the list. (Short format nominees are listed in a 
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