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'Lonely' is a masterpiece

Mina Hochberg

12:43 PM EDT, May 1, 2008

From the mind of a director who says he prefers making nonsense rather than sense, "Mister Lonely" is a triumph of sensory cinema.

Diego Luna stars as a Michael Jackson impersonator in Paris who meets a Marilyn Monroe impersonator (Samantha Morton) during a nursing-home gig. Sensing a kindred spirit, Marilyn whisks Michael off to a manor in the countryside, where she lives with a small colony of other impersonators -- Charlie Chaplin, Madonna, Abraham Lincoln, Little Red Riding Hood. Theater is life to this boisterous crew as they carouse, drink, raise sheep and frolic in forest ponds. Call them freaks, but this family of alter egoes thrives in its secluded oasis, making no distinction between real selves and pretend selves.

And then there are the flying nuns, a parallel, entirely unrelated story. Werner Herzog plays a priest who heads up a group of missionary nuns who discover that they can jump out of planes, sans parachutes, and live to tell the tale -- not because of their billowy attire, but through the sheer power of faith.

You can draw whatever connections you'd like between a cult of impersonators and a troop of flying nuns, but in the end, "Mister Lonely" is not calibrated for the brain. Attuned to the beauty of oddness, director Harmony Korine delivers 112 minutes of mesmerizing, eccentric tableaux that evoke emotion and visual hypnotism. But unlike less experienced directors who try to disguise dull styles with quirkiness, Korine's quirkiness is not a gimmick. His characters have an emotional grittiness that carries the story from beginning to end, disjointed though the scenes may seem. The result is a compelling, if somewhat inscrutable, minor masterpiece.