My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done

Synopsis:  Detectives Havenhurst (Willem Dafoe) is called to a  San Diego home where an old woman has been killed. The prime suspect is her adult son, Brad McCullum (Michael Shannon), who has taken refuge in the house across the road that they shared.  Soon his fiancee Ingrid (Chloe Sevigny) and his one-time theatre director Lee Meyers (Udo Kier) turn up and their stories explain how Brad has been slowly growing more eccentric.

Over the years we’ve learnt to be wary of films bearing the banner “Celebrity Director (Insert Name) Presents”  - it is usually a beat-up with the name helmer getting a chance to show off their cred and the actual director getting a leg-up because of it. Usually the artistic connection is fairly superficial – there may be some stylistic cross-references but generally it means, at best, a shared sensibility.

In this case, presumably to re-introduce him to the North American market, Werner Herzog is riding in on the coat-tails of David Lynch. There appears to be little else in the connection. Herzog (well before Lynch got underway) has his fair share of odd-ball films to his credit and though there is a dream-like sequence with a midget here, one of Herzog’s best-known films, Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970). is simply chockers with little people. Equally, in dealing with the dysfunctional in suburban America, My Son, My Son has an  observational quality that is certainly compatible with Lynch’s work but then Herzog has already gone well down this path with Stroszek (1977). So, all up, the connection appears to be largely a business one (Lynch is credited as one of quite a few executive producers)

The actual story, based on real events, written by Herzog with Herbert Golder is quite straight-forward  but Herzog tricks it up in interesting ways – the main setting is a kitschy 50s San Diego home filled with references to flamingos and sporting a cactus garden and a brash garage door mural; we flash back to Brad’s rafting trip in Peru where he starts losing his marbles; we take a visit to his nutty Uncle Ted’s ostrich farm, and to a market somewhere Asia where Brad wanders around in a daze;  there’s that dream-like sequence already mentioned; and, as the back story unfolds, we also get shown Brad and Ingrid’s involvement in a production of Aeschylus’s cycle of plays, The Oresteia, specifically, the part in which Orestes kills his mother, Clytemnestra, in order to avenge the death of his father, Agamemnon, an act with which the unhinged Brad has apparently over-identified.

All this works to create a portrait of the multiple facets of Brad’s disintegrating universe although from a practical point of view one can’t help but feel that Ingrid is pretty slow on the uptake as her boyfriend’s behaviour becomes increasingly sectionable (or, for that matter, from where the heck she got such awful dress sense). Michael Shannon does a fine job in portraying the presumably schizophrenic Brad, and film buffs will appreciate the casting of Brad Dourif and Udo Keir in prominent support roles. Unfortunately,Willem Dafoe doesn’t get a lot to do but appear earnestly efficient.

Based on his previous couple of films: Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans (2009), in which Shannon had a small role, and Rescue Dawn (2006) you’d have to say that although his documentary work remains strong, Herzog’s glory days as a feature director are behind him . My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done is more suitably modest in scale than the latter and less wilfully eccentric than the former – it is in fact a low-key stake-out movie for people who like a bit of the stylistically off-beat. Give yourself up to that and you won’t be disappointed.

 

 

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