There is a lot to like in “Mister Lonely,” Harmony Korine’s 2007 oddity about a group of celebrity impersonators who live on their own island. Like his best work — including “Gummo,” “Julien-Donkey Boy” and “Trash Humpers” — Korine identifies with the fringiest of the fringe in society, people who are usually mocked or ignored with a slight air of contempt.
Yet whereas “Gummo,” “Julien Donkey-Boy” and “Trash Humpers” tried to explore the psyches of its major characters, “Mister Lonely” seems satisfied to simply plop them onto their own island — a bucolic slice of the Scottish Highlands with a castle so impressive one wonders how these impoverished performers can afford it — and then let them do their thing.
This non-traditional approach has worked for Korine before. Indeed, he may be among the best filmmakers alive today when it comes to avoiding traditional plots and instead creating great movies solely out of distinctive locations, random events and character quirks. It makes perfect sense why he would use this approach again here, but the difference is that the seemingly unrelated vignettes in his better movies add up to a whole bigger than the sum of their parts. Here we simply see desperate artists attempting to impersonate their more successful peers, with varying degrees of success. Their misadventures may cause a love triangle between the Michael Jackson impersonator (Diego Luna), the Charlie Chaplin impersonator (Denis Lavant) and the Marilyn Monroe impersonator (Samantha Morton); force all of the impersonators to deal with an unexpected disease outbreak among their sheep; or lead the aspiring entertainers to put on a big stage performance at the end… but to what avail? What have we learned about these characters as individuals, or more broadly about people who act as professional impersonators?
There is a non sequitur subplot interspersed with these proceedings, as a nun’s near-fatal accident while attempting to feed a village in a developing country leads to a miracle that her colleagues attempt to impersonate. These proceedings pay off in an unpredictable payoff, one that ties things up in a suitably bleak and ironic way. It would work well as a short film, but feels shoehorned in and irrelevant here.
My sense is that Korine, who says that he conceived of this idea while going through a particularly rough time in his own life, wanted to convey a sense of isolation and loneliness (hence the title), as well as the extremes that some people will undertake to escape from the agonizing real world. It’s a great idea, and the concept here is a promising one for realizing it. Yet the movie never quite takes off.
It’s really just as simple as that.
Would I recommend “Mister Lonely”? It’s a shame that I must say no. There are some solid performances by Luna, Monroe and Lavant, and it is clear that Korine loves these characters and wants nothing more than for us to see what he sees. That is the hallmark quality of a visionary artist, and it is tragic when such an artist fails to achieve their vision.
Yet Korine does indeed fail here. It is a noble effort, to be sure, and he deserves praise for that much… but it is still a failure.