Wednesday night saw the North American premiere of Werner Herzog’s My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? at the Toronto International Film Festival. It's the German director’s second movie at TIFF after he showed Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans starring Nicolas Cage couple of nights ago.
My Son My Son is based on a real murder case from some years back which one of Herzog’s friends told him about and promised to write a screenplay for him. When that didn’t happen the director insisted they write it together and in four and a half days their screenplay was finished. The story is not a verbatim retelling of the actual case but pretty close. Herzog sets the scene minutes into the film as we find Brad played by Michael Shannon, holed up in his San Diego home with two hostages while local detectives Havenhurst (Willem Dafoe) and Fargas (Michael Peña) assess the situation outside. They are soon joined by Brad's girlfriend Ingrid, played by the terrific Chole Sevigny and Brad's theater friend Lee (a great turn by the always ultra watchable and Von Trier favorite Udo Kier). We soon learn that Brad lives with his mother and that he is the prime suspect in her murder which took place minutes before the police arrived.
Herzog really does get everything out there early. He seems to have no desire for his audience to spend the movie thinking about 'whodunnit' etc, instead he gives us virtually an hours worth of, less annoying than you might think, flashbacks explaining (kind of ) how Brad reached his breaking point. We are shown a young man with clear mental health which might have been due to narrowly escaping death by choosing not to whitewater raft with his pals in Peru weeks earlier. Additionally his relationship with his mother is uncomfortably weird with Big Love's Grace Zabriskie doing a fantastic job representing maternal suffocation.
The flashbacks create some unintentional humor, largely for me due to the hilarious disapproving facial contortions of Zabriskie, and occasionally hint at deeper issues but unfortunately they never felt adequately explored. Dafoe and Peña, while very capable actors, are really on auto-pilot in their roles allowing Sevigny and Shannon to really shine and carry the film. The addition of Udo Keir as the director of a Greek play Shannon and Brad act in together spices things up as I have never seen him in a movie where he wasn't playing a deliciously odd character. But again it doesn't give any real cohesiveness to the film and fairly early on you notice something is amiss in the storytelling.
You may have already guessed that this sounds very much like David Lynch territory and indeed he is credited as executive producer on the film. I will be honest and say I am no aficionado of Herzog's work with Rescue Dawn and Encounters at the End of the World being the only other two of his films I have seen. So there are undoubtedly people who will be better qualified than I to comment how this movie will fit into his body of work but for a newcomer to the director I was left somewhat satisfied but not much more than that. I thought the cast were terrific and I enjoyed some of the avant garde moments but this was not a film that will stay in the memory for very long. I have much higher hopes for Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans.
Rating: ***
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