Review of My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done (2010) by Nick P — 05 Mar 2011

Not too long ago, Herzog spoke bitterly to an interviewer about the small and dwindling interest people have in his films. What bigger validation is there than the fact that this 2010 piece may be a minor work in the Herzog catalog but it's nonetheless one of the most beguiling, provocative, disturbing and stunning experiences offered to American audiences this year.

Conceived some fifteen years or so before it was eventually produced, it's possible that only Herzog would have the nerve to, and thrive at, settling this remarkable cinematic entity by meditating on the future of a discarded basketball. And perhaps only Lynch, a known proponent and practitioner of transcendental meditation, would have the give it the green light.

One of the recent works shot on the RED One camera, much to Herzog's dissatisfaction, this horror film, sans blood, naked teenagers and gore, instead with an unknown, indistinctive fear stalking in you, is an impressive case of a movie not in self-steer. Here's a film where Udo Kier's eyeglasses are stolen from his pocket by an ostrich, has them wrenched from the ostrich's throat by a farmhand, soaked in slippery secretion, and warns the ostrich not to do that again.

In the interim, there's talk about how the xenophobic ostrich farmer one time raised a chicken 40 times the average and ate it. "Sooner pluck one than forty." One might hearken back to an earlier scene in which the film's protagonist talks with his gaunt pet flamingoes. Is a premise budding here? And the flamingo who gazing suspiciously at the camera, is it doing an impression of the gawking iguana in Herzog's Bad Lieutenant? For me it barely counts if a Herzog film supplies traditional movie amusements. Several of them do. This psychological thriller, in contrast, stuns all convention and declines all likely amusements, providing as an alternative the glee of watching Herzog nourish the police hostage blueprint into the chaotic cosmology of his mind's eye. It's like he started with the rough draft of a strikingly customary police procedural and set out following thoughts that attracted him virtually without alternative to whether or not they "work." But for those intimidating by the idea of "not getting it," the thing to remember is that Herzog works more in imagery than concepts. If he can capture the proper images for a film, he's not concerned with its "meaning." He casts Willem Dafoe as his hero, a homicide detective named Hank Havenhurst. Dafoe is recognized for his readiness to take on projects by directors who work on the brink. He is an outstanding actor, and fine here at establishing a cop who manages his job with constricted concentration and hardly any likely human sentiments. It's tiring to conjure up a police officer showing less reaction to a psychotic ostrich farmer.

His case concerns a man named Brad McCullum, played by the superb Michael Shannon as a man with a distressing stare underneath a sinking forehead. He murders his mother with a nefarious old-fashioned sword, as she sits having coffee with two neighbors. He's keen to repeat "Razzle Dazzle," which is reminiscent of "Helter Skelter," and yes, the movie is "inspired by a true story." His mother is a woman who is so kind she could, perhaps, arouse slaughter, particularly in a son who has endured life-changing encounters in the Peruvian rain forest, as this one has, and why, you ask? Maybe whenever Herzog meets an actor with disquieting eyes, like Klaus Kinski or Shannon, he decides he'll put them to nature's ultimate tests.

Detective Havenhurst takes over a center of operations facing the house where Brad is believed to be maintaining two hostages we never see, and questions Brad's fiancà (C)e Ingrid and his theater director, Lee Meyers. Both tell him tales that instigate flashbacks. In fact, most of the film entails flashbacks leading up to when Brad hacked his mother. Ingrid is played by Sevigny as a diffuse, agreeable young woman short of all preservation instinct, and Meyers is played by Kier as a man who is extraordinarily tolerant of Brad throughout rehearsals for the Greek tragedy Elektra. Ha.

The recollections of Meyers motivate the field trip to the ostrich farm run by Uncle Ted. If you've been following, the film's cast comprises virtually all cult actors regularly involved with cult filmmakers: Dafoe, Shannon, Sevigny, Kier, Dourif, Zabriskie, and I haven't even cited Oscar-nominated Irma P. Hall from the Coens' Ladykillers and Gabriel Pimentel, that all-purpose dwarf. Accordingly, the film's producer is David Lynch, one of the few producers who might deem it completely adds up that a cop drama set in San Diego would necessitate location filming in a Peruvian river valley. Herzog trusts the arguable mystical effect of locations, in the notion that if he shoots at the right place and time, those authentic vibes will pour into the film and make it more genuine. He has filmed on the inclines of functioning volcanoes and a thousand miles up the Amazon, and in this occult little movie, There's a scene that includes Mongolian yurt dwellers. I'm not sure what they had to do with the story. Notwithstanding, I'll not soon forget their image, which is more than I can say for most scenes at the three-quarter point in most cop movies. I'm also thankful for two very long shots, one with Zabriskie and the other Pimentel, in which they appear to be freeze frames, but you can see the actors moving just a bit. What do these shots symbolize? Why, the director's intolerance for convention.