Werner Herzog (2009)

The credits show David Lynch as one of the executive producers, nothing more, but publicity for the film has implied a larger creative ‘collaboration’ between him and Herzog – perhaps in the hope that the scenario of My Son, My Son, about a murder in suburban San Diego, will resonate with fans of Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks.  The screenplay, which Herzog co-wrote with Herbert Golder (a professor of classical civilisation at Boston University, according to Wikipedia), is based on a real-life matricide.  Mark Yavorsky, a UCSD graduate student who’d been cast as Orestes in a student production of the Oresteia, killed his own mother with an antique sword.  (In the film, the murder weapon has actually been used in the stage production, which must have gone ahead while the health and safety department weren’t looking.)  Yavorsky has been renamed Brad McCullum:  while he’s holed up in his house (his mother was murdered in a neighbour’s home across the road), we learn – in flashbacks deriving from police interviews with those who knew him – about Brad’s life and state of mind.   The story holds your attention but Herzog doesn’t seem to have that much to reveal about Brad, in most respects a rather generic crazy-killer figure.  Not the first Herzog protagonist to have a mind-changing experience in the Andes, Brad on his return from the mountains suffers from depression, hears voices telling him what to do and has religious delusions (seeing God in the face of the man on a Quaker cereal packet).  He’s also dominated by his mother.  Michael Shannon plays him with great empathy, though, and there’s the odd bit that’s more distinctively eloquent about the turbulence of Brad’s mind, as when he visits a naval hospital explaining to uncomprehending officialdom that he wants to ‘visit the sick – in general’.

The structure of the film detracts from its more weirdly colourful details.  In Lynch’s finest portraits of small-town mayhem, there’s an enjoyable traction between descriptions of the locals’ eccentricities and exploration of the vicious, pathological underbelly of the place.  Here, because we know from the start what Brad has done, it’s harder to be amused by, for example, the morbid-looking jelly Mrs McCallum unfailingly serves for dessert or his coffee mug emblazoned with the words ‘Razzle Dazzle’.  The same goes for his thing about flamingos.   (The front of the family home is painted rosy pink and he keeps two of the birds – ‘eagles in drag’ as he calls them – as pets.  They’re also, obviously, the two ‘hostages’ he keeps telling the police he’s holding.)  The poetry in the image of a basketball, left by Brad in a spindly, wintry tree in the hope that a young basketball player will come along and pick it out of the bare branches, is diluted by the eventual repetition of the image, which sees the hope fulfilled.  Chloë Sevigny is touching as Brad’s long-suffering fiancée and Willem Dafoe does well as an exceedingly conscientious detective but there are disappointingly monotonous performances too – from Grace Zabriskie (as the smiley-hyper-tense murderee), Udo Kier (the director of the Oresteia) and Brad Dourif (a bug-eyed, racist ostrich farmer).

15 September 2010