Tynan's Anger

Arts & Culture Commentary from a Loving Digital Skeptic

Movie Review: My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done

Posted on | December 11, 2009 | No Comments

A red flag should go up when you encounter a movie with a deeply disturbed individual, and Willem Dafoe is playing the voice of reason. Adding to the cognitive dissonance is the fact that the movie is a Werner Herzog project bankrolled by David Lynch. In my particular press screening, it was playing in a theater normally playing Antichrist.

If you want a nuanced, thorough cinematic approach to madness, My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? may be your best bet. Yet, applying nuance and discipline to a state of mind that rejects all that makes for a peculiar, less-than-satisfying movie experience, even when put in the most capable hands.

I have yet to see Michael Shannon perform as anything other than a dangerous and/or deeply disturbed individual. I do not know if he’s capable of anything else, but he has been a scene-stealer every time he shows up. It’s difficult to steal scenes in a lead role, though, and Shannon, on-the-ball as ever in his madness, will strike fear in the hearts of every sane audience member in the theater. No doubt the recent Fort Hood shootings will factor into discussions of this film, which is loosely based on the case of Mark Yavosky in 1979. Very rarely has this type of character been at the focal point of a movie from beginning to end. Normally the psychopath reveals himself to be a psychopath (Psycho), you see sane people react to a psychopath (Zodiac), or you gloss over the darker parts of madness for the cool parts about murder (American Psycho).

Herzog, however, doesn’t give us that luxury. At the beginning of a movie, we see a murder investigation that lasts all of five minutes. The rest is spent trying to coax Brad McCullum (Shannon) out of his neighbor’s house, where he has killed his mother, brandishes a rifle, and claims to have take hostages. The police and SWAT team are already swarming, looking for any leads on how to break in without getting anyone else hurt. Detective Havenshurst (Dafoe) is lucky enough to have come across Brad’s fiancee Ingrid (Chloe Sevigny) and Lee Meyers (Udo Kier), a director who worked with Brad on a predictably abstract staging of The Oresteia.

Kier’s performance is key to the movie’s thematic viability. Avuncular to Brad even between smirks, Meyers recognizes that the appeal of McCullum is his talent and unfiltered self-expression. My Son eschews cinematic stereotypes to show that these talents are more by-products than sources of his madness. Meyers fails to harness Brad to memorize his lines or stick to any sense of discipline, which leaves him out of the show upon production. But the appeal of Brad’s madness has lingered in Meyers, as well as his beyond reasonably faithful fiancee.

Rationality and narrative logic are difficult to maintain in any display of madness, and they are all but useless in film, which lends itself perfectly to non-linearity. The storytelling of My Son is done in the retrospective, Citizen Kane style, and yet instead of asking around, it all takes place in one location, outside Brad’s apartment, with no chance for any redemption, and with the only hope being no further lives lost.

Herzog filmed My Son, My Son in four different locations, including Canada, Mexico, and Peru, and was smart to film and release this project after Bad Lietunant. Yet, the action is always drawn back to Shannon, staked out in San Diego. There is no climax, no shootout, just the depressing, inevitable display of where madness ends.

What Herzog has sacrificed here is any source of entertainment, intellectually or otherwise. My Son is not a Funny Games-style rebuke of the audience, nor is it a murder mystery or journalistic exposé. Instead, it’s a rather dry, documentary look at the kind of madness that can be sustained in film for a handful of scenes at best. At best, such as Shannon’s Oscar-nominated turn in Revolutionary Road, the occasional interjection of madness can help break through a dull scenario when there’s a much more interesting reality being unspoken.

Herzog, world cinema’s finest purveyor of strangeness, is too smart to romanticize that kind of role for a whole movie. Nor does he cater to the audience’s proclivity for violent madness in the way Lynch has embraced, and in the way Funny Games attacks. Rather, it’s a movie that shows just how drab and inconsequential madness is on its own terms. With My Son, Herzog has made a movie that shows why movies about disturbed individuals are not usually made, and why actors like Shannon rarely receive featured roles unless they diversify.

Photo by Lena Herzog, Copyright Absurda

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