Australian Centre for the Moving Image: Public interest and critical acclaim have increasingly been the preserve of Werner Herzog’s documentaries over the last decade: Grizzly Man is remembered, The Wild Blue Yonder forgotten, despite both coming out in 2005. A project such as The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call – New Orleans, with a jittery, scattershot Nicholas Cage lead performance, is regarded as a foible, as if the German filmmaker should be allowed his private jokes.
My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done may do something to address that wrongful notion. Although it remains a defiantly Herzogian undertaking, even unexpectedly straining against the boundaries of deadpan comedy, this emotionally arid and topical drama feels connected to the times. Unfolding in flashback, after a grown son, Brad McCullum (Michael Shannon), has killed his mother, Mrs. McCullum (Grace Zabriskie), with a sword in a neighbour’s house and then retreated to their suburban San Diego home as the police arrive, it allows the filmmaker, who co-wrote the screenplay with Herbert Golder, to take the minor news item – madness and matricide – and open it up to his off-kilter take on the world.
Never the same since a trip to Peru to kayak ended with a voice telling him not to join his friends one day and they all subsequently drowned (South American rivers are rarely a welcome presence in Herzog’s work), Brad has returned home an increasingly damaged presence, testifying to his fiancé, Ingrid (Chloe Sevigny), about God’s presence (specifically in the kitchen), and diverting from society’s path. He is a representation of American confusion, the urge to replace the confusing and contemporary with the salve of religious righteousness.
Herzog is aided by the presence of Michael Shannon, whose dark, depthless eyes convey inexplicable threat. The hulking Shannon has long played the unhinged heavy, but the weight of inner turmoil he carries, as if his moral centrifuge is off its axis, has increasingly made him an emblem of psychic unease in everything from Revolutionary Road to Take Shelter. Here, he’s physically smaller, as if drawn into himself, but he makes disaffection and menace a palpable pairing, and as Ingrid recounts his year since returning from Peru you see Brad’s march towards tragedy.
The story is taken up by a theatre director, Lee (Udo Kier), who is directing Brad in the title role of Euripides’ Orestes, the Greek tragedy about a son who murders his mother. Kier, that most cultured of German aesthetes, is juxtaposed against Brad’s life, with the movie allowing you to deduce that the part took over the actor. (In a wry joke from Herzog, Lee tells Willem Defoe’s police detective Havenhurst that Brad was undoubtedly troubled, but he was also a fine actor.)
If the prevailing independent mood is minimal, pared back, Herzog remains a maximalist – too much is not enough. Even as the characters communicate in stilted line readings, sudden snarls, and extended silences that feel attuned to the hyper-real suburban setting, the director feeds in ideas and allusions; tiny Verne Troyer (Mini-Me from the Austin Powers franchise) is even sighted at one point.
'It’s all a little confusing. Can you help us out?" Detective Havenhurst plaintively asks Ingrid, even as a SWAT team surrounds the house where Brad hollers for pizza and privacy. So it is with Herzog, who is as interested in joshing the conventions of a police procedural by having Havenhurst’s inept partner, Detective Vargas (Michael Pena), keep trying to suggest the ludicrous plot points that a thriller might consider, as he is in examining the tenets of conviction and violence that appear to haunt America. It’s by no means a straightforward telling, but with such an attuned central performance by Michael Shannon, it’s possible to take in much of what Werner Herzog wants you to.
