Fittingly, it was during a weekend of solitude that I watched Harmony Korine's Mister Lonely. Camping wasn't in the cards due to weather and my man-friend was rapidly entering the psychotically grouchy state that accompanies his periodic attempts to quit smoking, so I volunteered to take over a house/dog sitting gig a friend had started way back on the 11th of May. She was homesick, and I was sick of home, so it worked out well. Last night found me on a kidney bean colored couch somewhere in the Inner Sunset, one mutt curled into the crook of my legs, one into the "C" of my chest, and a flag-sized flat screen in front of me.
I've always said that I wish I could un-see Kids, not because it wasn't brilliant (it was), but because it was so graphic that it left stains on my soul. Right from the noisy make-out session at the beginning, it felt like that film was leaving a trail of slime on me that would never fully wash away, and I was right--it hasn't--so I've studiously been avoiding Gummo and Julien, Donkey Boy for many-a-year. Sure, it's significant that Korine wrote a film that has stayed with me so powerfully for so long, but still, I never would have watched Mister Lonely if I'd known it was his work. There are some people I just don't want to let into my psyche, and he's one of 'em.
Or so I thought. What I've learned in the interim is that Harmony Korine is still capable of creating indelible scenes, but his gifts have matured since his early work, resulting in more delicately shaded stories. He's still interested in tragic worldliness, but he perceives the lightness in things now too. Mister Lonely is downright ethereal at times, in fact. It floats and flutters like the skydiving nuns of the inscrutable sub-plot (a metaphor for filmmaking?). Korine's visual acuity has only grown sharper over the years too. Mister Lonely is full of canary yellows, cornflower blues, fire engine reds. And while the impersonator theme is partly a referendum on our celebrity obsessed culture, it's also an exploration of what makes an icon iconic, so you get all these beautifully impossible snapshots throughout the film: Little Red Riding Hood playing chess with Abraham Lincoln, The Queen of England in bed with the Pope...Michael Jackson in a motor boat with Marilyn Monroe.
In Mister Lonely there's some quirky score work by Sun City Girls and J. Spaceman of Spiritualized, but the film's most memorable music moments come from a boldly textured various artists soundtrack crafted with help from music supervisor, Liz Gallacher (Disco Pigs, Snow Cake, 24 Hour Party People). The opening sequence is pure genius, and shows how the past several years of directing music videos mean that Korine now approaches soundtrack more fearlessly than ever. It features the Michael Jackson impersonator riding a miniature motorcycle in slow motion to Bobby Vinton's 1964 hit "Mister Lonely." Vinton's voice has that lilting, unintentionally androgynous sound of the early sixties. It was the last American recorded song to go to number one before the Beatles captured the charts, and it perfectly sets up the untenable fairy tale of this film--an innocence so innocent that it could never have been real, it's the bubble that these celebrity impersonators are trying desperately to preserve and just as desperately, to escape.
As poetic as that sequence is though, it doesn't hold a candle to the final bookend of the film, the heart breaking and gorgeous "My Life," sung by the incredible Iris Dement.
My life, it don't count for nothing.
When I look at this world, I feel so small.
My life, it's only a season:
A passing September that no one will recall.
The song is played during a slow, panning shot of the egg portraits Michael has done of his fellow celebrity impersonators. Yes, that's right. I said egg portraits, as in the portraits of them he's painted on eggs. The scene is both powerful and more than a little silly, but somehow absolutely brimming with pathos. The fragility of the eggs, of identity, it just all comes together in this one shot, and it shows off yet another of Korine's gifts: his ability to examine the glories and imperfections of humanity both, and still walk away clutching something lovely...protecting it even.
But I gave joy to my mother.
And I made my lover smile.
And I can give comfort to my friends when they're hurting.
And I can make it seem better for a while.
It was a happy mistake to have watched Mister Lonely last night. Harmony Korine is just as unconventional as ever, but he's outgrown the gratuitous confrontationalism of youth, and if Mister Lonely is any indication, is heading into some seriously rich territory. I look forward to future work.
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