My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done

My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done

108 Minutes

It’s impossible to consider My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done outside the context of its slightly older brother, the recent Nicolas Cage vehicle with an equally unwieldy title. The two share not only a law and order focus (and a cagey presence in Michael Shannon) but also a persistent portrayal of psychosis as something fascinating in itself. That’s not new ground for director Werner Herzog, who has elevated insanity to an artistic level many times before, but in these two films it comes off as particularly circular: madness begetting more madness begetting more madness

This is especially true in My Son, which seems to plot its bizarre interior confabulations as stepping-stones on a trail to nowhere. In a loose retelling of real-life events, Brad McCullum returns from a trip to Peru, bizarrely exhibits his new found insanity, finds God on a Quaker Oats box, acts in Sophocles’ “Orestes” and then uses the matricidal bent of that play as inspiration to kill his overbearing mother. He does this of course with an antique samurai sword, clutching his lucky coffee mug.

The entire thing is perversely entertaining, but also exhibits a highly shook-up sense of grab-bag weirdness. The strange events that populate the story plug gaps in time, even offer cursory explanations, but lead to no real conclusions. We leave the film understanding Brad’s motivation as well as we did at the beginning, which may be another of Herzog’s dead-serious yet mischievous assertions: that madness has no rhyme or reason, or that it’s its own reward. It’s easiest to charge the film’s failure to the fact that this is a David Lynch collaboration, which seems to pull the focus out of Herzog’s signature world. And yes, there are failures that result from a weird sort of friendly emulation, most notably a scene featuring a tuxedo-wearing midget singing in Spanish. Yet this is less indicative of a copycat problem than a larger rootlessness, where so much of the movie’s weirdness already feels arbitrary.

There are also times when the sensibilities of the two dovetail beautifully, as with the pink flamingos Brad keeps as pets, with whom he argues with as if they were human, or Brad Dourif as his racist, ostrich-tending uncle. There are also half-submerged ideas that play out as dissociated but interesting in themselves. The casting of fellow German Udo Kier as Brad’s theatre director, and the parallels this draws to Herzog himself. The way Greek tragedy is invoked against the sterile setting of San Diego, whose skyline looms blandly and menacingly in the background.

The problem is the slightness of these ideas in connection with the constant parade of strange behavior. Too much of the action is too perfectly outlandish, too right in its ideal sense of the absurd. It’s the same kind of loss of focus that plagued the director’s early Even Dwarfs Started Small, where a political subtext was swallowed by all-consuming (although yes, still entertaining) freak-show spectacle.

By the time Brad drives up to a naval hospital, attempting to comfort “the sick in general,” a scene that ends with him clutching an armful of embroidered pillows, it’s clear that the film has somewhat gleefully gone off the rails. Is this done intentionally, as Herzog subverting himself in the same way that Bad Lieutenant subverted the police procedural? It’s hard to tell, but like those pillows (one of which Brad later uses to try to smother his mom) My Son is all easy softness pressed into a hard purpose.