David O'ConnellMy Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done
August 18th 2011 03:15
What a strange film this is. Which is perhaps not a great surprise considering the personnel attached to it. Firstly, there’s the revelation of one of the executive producers in the “David Lynch presents” opening card. The film’s co-writer and director is that mad, unpredictable genius, Werner Herzog. In the lead role is every modern film connoisseur’s powder-keg of choice, Michael Shannon, seen lending a frightening, demented authenticity to his most memorable turns in William Friedkin’s Bug (2006), Sam Mendes’s Revolutionary Road (2008), and most recently in Jeff Nichols’s Take Shelter (2011). To top it all off, Shannon’s mother is played by the always unnerving Grace Zabriskie, glimpsed not irregularly as a less than stable presence in a number of previous Lynch enterprises.
In My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done (2009), Shannon plays Brad McCullum. Brad’s been acting a little weird - according to neighbours and witnesses to his shocking crime - ever since returning from Peru a year ago. He now claims to obey only an inner voice, first heard just before a group of friends went rafting in Peru. Brad’s 'voice' told him not to go; wise advice since all his friends subsequently perished. He also claims to see visions of God, taking his signs from the unlikeliest sources. He sees God’s face, for example, in the old man depicted on a can of ‘Puritan Oatmeal’.
We learn about Brad’s strange journey via his girlfriend Ingrid (a morose, unenthusiastic Chloe Sevigny) and friend Lee (a typically awful Udo Kier), who relate snippets to the cop (Willem Defoe) leading the investigation. A potential hostage situation has developed with Brad sequestered inside his house, his interactions with the police and demands becoming pottier by the hour.
Herzog’s film is a strange beast indeed. Stacked every which way with a steady stream of anecdotes and snapshots of Brad, we’re asked to make our own call: are these oblique clues to an unresolved jigsaw puzzle? Or fragments of madness strewn ornamentally around so as to maintain the looniness quotient? One example of many is Brad’s admission that at one point, he cried for days, but only from one eye. Then there’s the incongruous appearance of a dapper midget amidst a snowy landscape, a moment that feels like a very Lynchian injection of surrealism to emphasise a point already glittering with jagged acclamations of its protagonist’s inner torment. And what about the raging flamingo motif? Brad keeps two of them as pets whilst his house is studded with others in the form of posters, lights, soft toys and table decorations.
Herzog and co-writer Herbert Golder constantly tip the scales of perception to such an extent that any microscopic example of normality takes on the appearance of an aberration and exception to the rule. The strangeness never abates, which may be the point of Herzog’s deliberately vague definition of madness. In some ways, My Son, My Son feels like a throwback to the director’s chequered past, a time littered with infuriatingly uneven projects that teeter between tedium and genius. Perhaps Shannon will become Herzog’s new Klaus Kinski.
This is a film that blurs the boundaries between sanity and psychosis, though not always in a dramatically interesting way. The eccentricities of Herzog’s approach count for a lot however; enough so that you’re almost convinced this is a film so bad it’s half-decent. Shannon, at least, exerts his usual magnetism in a fevered performance that cancels out the mediocrity of every other participant crouched in expectation around him. His tone may be as inconsistent as cheap putty but Herzog knows where to shine his light when it really counts. Conclusions, however, are superfluous, an edict as true as any when dealing with Herzog.
My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done will screen at Melbourne's ACMI cinemas from August 19- August 22 (details HERE) before receiving a limited release in selected cinemas from August 25.
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