My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done

Plot synopsis:
The film begins with Detective Havenhurst driving with his partner Detective Vargas. They receive a call and drive to the scene of a murder. As they push their way through the crowd at the crime scene, they see Brad McCullum leaving with a coffee cup. Inside the house, the detectives find the body of Mrs. McCullum who has just been stabbed with an antique sword. At the scene are the neighbors and chief witnesses, Mrs. and Miss Roberts. The detectives soon realize that they had just seen the murderer leaving the scene.
The Robertses tell the detectives that Brad was disturbed, and had changed when he went to Peru recently. In a flashback we see Brad in Peru preparing for a kayak trip on a raging river. Back to the present time, the police have learned that Brad has taken two hostages in the house across the street. The police surround the house, and Brad's fiancée Ingrid arrives. Ingrid talks to Havenhurst about Brad's trip to Peru, saying that Brad's friends all drowned on their kayak trip, which Brad had decided at the last minute not to take part in; he later claimed that the voice of God had told him to stay behind. Several more flashbacks follow of Brad and Ingrid in Brad's bedroom, talking with Mrs. McCullum, looking at nearby houses, having dinner. Back in the present, Brad demands pizza for himself and the hostages, along with a car for transportation to Mexico.
In another flashback we see Brad in rehearsals for a Greek tragedy directed by Lee Meyers. As the pizza is delivered to Brad, Lee arrives at the scene of the crime. Lee talks with Havenhurst about Brad, and we flash back to Lee and Brad visiting Uncle Ted's ostrich farm. Brad convinces Uncle Ted to give him the antique sword which would be used in the crime. Brad uses the sword in more rehearsals for the play, in which he plays the part of a man who kills his mother, who is played by his fiancée Ingrid. Brad becomes disruptive and is eventually kicked out of the production, but still travels to Calgary with Lee and his mother to attend a performance. We see some footage of Brad at Machu Picchu, and then at a Central Asian market.
A SWAT team arrives to take command of the hostage situation, and the detective talks further with Ingrid and Lee. We see a flashback to Brad and Ingrid's trip to Tijuana, after which they go to Bob Wilson Naval Hospital to "visit the sick in general". Brad buys several pillows at the hospital gift shop. Then Brad and Ingrid walk in Balboa Park, and Brad gives away his bag of pillows, keeping one, and leaves his basketball in a tree.
Back at the crime scene, Havenhurst interviews Miss Roberts, who had witnessed the crime. In a flashback to the scene just before the murder, we see the Robertses sitting down with Brad and his mother for coffee. When Brad steps out, his mother tells Mrs. Roberts that Brad has just tried to smother her with a pillow. Brad gets his coffee cup, and then goes to his car and returns with a baseball bat and the sword. He hands the bat to Miss Roberts, saying "kill me before I do it". She does nothing, and he draws the sword and holds it in front of his mother. Miss Roberts tells detective Haverhurst that Brad stabbed her, though we do not see the crime on camera.
Ingrid and Lee talk to Brad, urging him to release the hostages and surrender. Ingrid realizes that Brad's hostages are his two pet flamingoes, and the SWAT team moves in and arrests Brad. As Brad is led into the car, we see shots of running ostriches. The final shot is in Balboa Park, where a young boy resembling Brad picks up the basketball.Source: Wikipedia

Tags: psychedelic, murder, flashback

Review:
It concerns a man whom, after acting in and becoming obsessed with a Greek play, chooses to do that which his character does; kill his mother with a sword used as a prop in the production.
Brad, a brooding man-child who lives with his mom, gradually goes nuts, saying and doing increasingly unhinged (and funny) things to his clueless loved ones, played by goofy character actors like Udo Kier, Grace Zabriskie and Chloe Sevigny.
Story One. The Truth.The film is based on the true story of Mark Yavorsky, a San Diego man who stabbed his mother to death, inspired by his recent role as Euripides' Orestes in a production of The Eumenides at University of California, San Diego.
(The Truth isn't very interesting anyway, so you can skip this bit.)Story Two. The Cinematic Truth.Brad McCullum (Michael Shannon) is maybe in his late twenties but lives with his eccentric and overbearing ("You know you like your jello!") mother.
This occurrence is treated in a fairly routine way near the beginning of the film, so we can enjoy the rest of the time in extended flashbacks to understand what really happened and why.Story Three.
"At least some people act a role," says Brad, "others play a part." Historically, it's about replacing matriarchy.This is a film where you are entranced throughout, awaiting the dark brooding fury or the mother's 'vengeful hounds from hell.' (Or at least an ostrich that steals yours glasses while you're cleaning them.) It even has a dwarf.
The film is based on a true story where an actor who was performing in a Ancient Greek play about a man who kills his mother to avenge his father's death, does just that and kills his own mother.
I can't imagine what would posses someone to do this hideous act, but this movie tries to put together some sort of rationale as to what would lead a person to do this.I thought that Shannon's character would be the most interesting, but after thinking it over I found that the other people in his life were even more peculiar.
I had a hard time getting past these questions.What helped was the entrancing camera work and film composition that Herzog put together along with cinematographer Peter Zeitlinger.
Roger Ebert said about My Son that it "confounds all convention and denies all expected pleasures", and this is partially true because there's a murder but we know who did it and we know where he is, right across the street, and the hostage situation that develops outside the suspect's place is perfunctory at best (which means Willem Dafoe as the homicide detective has very little to do here, no this is Mike Shannon's film), but in place of the tired conventions of the detective movie Herzog invents new pleasures, strange and mystifying and sometimes completely mindbending and hilarious, like the mental image of a midget on a baby horse being chased by a 45 pound chicken that is taller than both rider and horse, an idea for a commercial Brad Dourif explains wide-eyed with fascination, but a commercial to what how should he know!
This is an amazing film on the poetics of madness using the real story of a man who slew his mother with a sword to tell us about absurdity in the world.
In a meeting between Herzog and Lynch before the film was made, they both expressed a desire for, in Herzog's words, "a return to essential filmmaking" with small budgets, good stories, and the best actors available.
Directed by Werner Herzog, produced by David Lynch - quite a lot for any film to live up to?
Although the film was directed by Herzog it often displays Lynch's hallmarks; the constant foreboding music humming low in the soundtrack, the moments of quirky humour, the mannered dialogue and the weird characters, most notably Lynch regular Grace Zabriskie as the mother.
It's almost as though Herzog is intentionally paying homage to his fellow left-field director, while incorporating some of his own personal concerns such as a crazy central character, weird animals, dangerous nature and, most specifically of all, a river trip in Peru!
And the film does have some good oddball actors at its disposal, like Zabriskie, Willem Dafoe, Brad Dourif and Udo Kier.
On the DVD for Herzog's film The Wild Blue Yonder there is an interview with Brad Dourif (the star in that film and the guy who plays the uncle in this one) and for some reason he mentions the script for this movie saying it was unmade but brilliant.
At this point the film appears like it will focus on this but instead we get a story constructed of flashbacks which mostly come from the perspective of Brad while also get nothing from him in the present.
The police action and interviews outside the house form the structure for all this but while in another version they would be the "all", here they seem to exist almost like a necessary evil.I say this because the film seems much more interested in the flashbacks and in particular using them as a tool to bewilder, set a very strange tone and generally make the viewer feel on-edge.
As such we think we know the score (because we have seen this genre like they have done this job) but yet what we then experience not only doesn't fit this expectation, but ultimately we are left none the wiser in terms of our understanding; the man and the crime remain an enigma with only the very obvious link to the play's themes being the "reason" (if there even is such a thing approaching that word).
I mean you have a great director in Werner Herzog and when I heard David Lynch was involved and saw the cast I started rubbing my hands together.
My fancy regarding this film, fictitious naive but perhaps useful is that David Lynch found the worst cookie-cutter script out there, clichéd police procedural crud which would take up about a quarter of an hour of a TV show like Law and Order or The Shield, and challenged Werner Herzog to make it into a great film.
Here he plays Brad McCullum, a man who has failed to escape out from under his mothers skirts, who lives at home and is infuriated by his dysfunctional life, he is reminiscent of Alessandro from Marco Bellochio's Fists in the Pockets (I pugni in tasca), and comes to believe in solving his problems, and his family problems (likened to the curse of Atreus) via a Carthaginian solution (killing).It's quite something to behold, his descent into psychosis, and it's organic, you can see why it's happening, it's not something that's superstitious, or to do with evil.
I just get frustrated, because everywhere life is so timid, and people refuse to grow or have fun, and I feel stifled.Brad actually likes to give his stuff away, in the film the main symbol of this is his basketball, which apparently was a game he excelled at.
I, like many reviewing this film, are a BIG fan of David Lynch and Werner Herzog.
The film looks good, the acting is competent, but what could have been a fascinating character study turns out to be an empty story.
Probably because director Werner Herzog thought it would have messed with the boring atmosphere or the slow timing of the movie.
And tooo awkward.The finest David Lynch-inspired-nonsensical moment comes midway into movie in which we're randomly thrown into a snow-covered setting along with David and two new characters: a hillbilly and a man with dwarfism (sorry I'm not 100% what the politically correct term is so that's what I'm sticking with).
Here, she is just a painfully obvious caricature -- watching her feels like having an intestinal gas attack on a cross-country plane flight.I saw this movie based on the fact that Werner Herzog directed it, despite serious reservations about the presence of the now very overexposed Willem Dafoe.
Which goes to show you, that Herzog indeed has something fascinating to offer for an actor or actress.And the movie is very complicated with rich characters and strange events and turns.
It's got a shed-load of big actors on board doing unconventional performances, there many quirky, messed up moments, a lot of dark humour and a floaty script that fleshes out a distinct dreamy, lost atmosphere, accentuated by the incredible cinematography and music choices that are not typical of any film I've ever seen.Secondly, the cultural merit: It starts off like a pragmatic cop drama, you get Willem Dafoe and his understudy, chatting chit, doing what cops in films do, shooting the breeze and driving to the crime scene like any other day on the job, but then they arrive and the mystery starts to unravel and the story's told in a series of flashbacks told by witnesses, and cutbacks to the "present" where the police are negotiating Michael Shannon's surrender.
Really, when a film like this comes out, and it's the closest thing to art you've seen for a long time in modern cinema, believe me when I say it's worth a watch.
When you get a movie that says "David Lynch presents a Werner Herzog film", you know you'll be in for some weirdness.
For me it's a continuation not so much of a crime genre story like Bad Lieutenant Port of Call New Orleans, but of Herzog's oeuvre in general about man's plunge and practical capture by madness due to nature (i.e. Peruvian jungle).
And for fans of the director, it should be quite an event to be able to possible walk from one theater in NYC or LA playing Port of Call New Orleans to see another playing My Son My Son.And yet, for all of the good stuff going on in this film, I might be more inclined to recommend the crazy-but-lucid head-trip of Port of Call over the hit-or-miss affair of My Son My Son. In this case we get the story of Brad, a sometimes-actor who takes a cue from a Sophocles play he's acting in to kill his mother one morning with a sword he used as a prop for the play.
The set-ups of the flashbacks are often unconvincing, and there's a disconnect I felt between Michael Shannon's character and his girlfriend played by Chloe Sevigny (I don't often beg for explanation, but really, why are they together, how did they meet, WTF man).
Like, say, Synecdoche, New York, it's got incredible sights and moments, things of this world we haven't seen in a film in a while (or maybe ever) like ostrich farms and a 1920's gospel song put over cops with their hands up in a hostage scene.
A murder committed by a disturbed young man and the events which led to the crime are told in flashbacks, resembling ancient drama plays or film classics like Rashomon, amongst many others.
Beautiful combination of mesmerizing Herzog's eye, the poetic, alienating protagonist, inducing the dark subconscious intensity akin to Lynch's movies, and Ernst Reijseger's inimitable music, projecting the whole story to a purely aesthetical shape, like some scenes that end with a long awkward pause in a few seconds load with musical grace and turn harmonious and illusory.The film is a sequence of Brad's madness manifestations, starting with an obsession with his stage image, an ancient Greek seeking catharsis in his Mother's murder.I re-watch it with constant awe..
His collaboration with Nicholas Cage, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call-New Orleans, was an interesting mess, with Cage bringing back that effective campy-style of acting that first made him famous, a style we all loved and mourned for when he gave it up to become a "serious actor." The film itself, however, was an in-cohesive tale, pieced together with blotches of scenes that at times didn't gel and often got in the way of the storytelling.
Without Cage's performance, Bad Lieutenant would've withered away, joining the million of other films that have failed to inspire us.Herzog's 2009 attempt, however, My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?, now available on DVD, succeeds greatly in its storytelling, its originality as a film, and its portrayal of a disturbed man lost in the world, looking for something to believe in, ultimately feeling he needs to kill his mother to liberate himself from the demons that haunt his mind, as well as his soul.
Michael Shannon, who we now know as the bitter, troubled F.B.I. agent on HBO's Boardwalk Empire, plays the son and his performance is almost as brutally honest as any other in a Herzog film.
Brad Douriff's appearance in the film is almost a comedic element in itselfI think when all is said and done, what this movie needs more than anything is a bit more space to be fleshed out.
After lying in production limbo for almost fifteen years, director Werner Herzog finally managed to make his film, loosely based on the story of Mark Yavorsky, with the help of producer David Lynch.
By showing us the murder and the murderer within the first five minutes, Herzog removes any element of mystery surrounding the crime, and instead focuses on the mental disintegration of its protagonist, as well as placing his own spin on the familiar hostage crisis drama.Detectives Havenhurst (Willem Dafoe) and Vargas (Michael Pena) arrive at the scene of a recent murder, where an elderly lady has been stabbed with an antique sword.
Outside the crime scene, a man drinking coffee says something strange to Havenhurst, and shortly after, the detectives realise this man is Brad Macallam (Michael Shannon), the son of the murdered woman and also the murderer.
What they discover is a man changed by a recent trip to Peru, where he pulled out of a kayak trip at the last minute after hearing the voice of God telling him not to, only for everyone else to be killed.This is certainly one of Herzog's 'smaller' films, following the almost mainstream and outlandish (but hugely entertaining) Bad Lieutenant earlier the same year.
Big fan of most of this cast.Not such a big fan of this movie.It's eighty some minutes and feels like 6 hours.You really, really, really, really really, really have to suspend disbelief to get into this film.
There has been a lot of bad talk about this film but I have watched a lot of Herzog and I love this movie.
From his mental instabilities to his obsession over a Greek play this is what My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done asks.Where do I begin, firstly, if you are not interested in what drove the leading character to kill his mother then the chances are that you are not going to like this movie.
It is good acting, Michael Shannon does play a great crazy man.
Now I am not saying WIlliam Shannon did a bad job in the film playing this disturbed man--it was a lovely performance of a madman.
My advice--see both films.The movie begins with two detectives (one is Willem Defoe) being called to a murder scene.
All in all a good film (except for the god-awful score)--with the sort of weirdness you'd expect from a David Lynch production and the quality direction of Werner Herzog.
As we begin to empathize with Brad, he seems to make the very normal, modern, clean suburban world around him seem almost like a dystopia simply by his presence.The real star of this film in my mind was Grace Zabriskie, who played Brad's mother.
When you start to watch the movie you will immediately notice some of the actors: Willem Dafoe, Brad Dourif, Michael Shannon, Michael Pena, Grace Zabriskiejust to name a few.
Perhaps this film defines me as an average movie-goer but it was my third trip to an art-house cinema (Cineclub de Tavira, Portugal) in a week and by far the least satisfying, and I am usually a fan of both David Lynch and Werner Herzog.
C. Fields's heyday, and at least in his pictures they were played that way for laughs.Herzog draws some good performances out of a talented cast but the story, such as it is, hardly extends beyond a ten to fifteen minute short, in fact the trailer that was shown the week before the screening contained all of the film's most significant action.The most disappointing element of all was that the S.W.A.T. team does not shoot the lead character to pieces in the last scene.
You like this rubbish not because it's good but to signify to yourself and others that you're a certain sort of person.Brad McCullum (Michael Shannon) is a glaringly disturbed man who kills his mother with a sword one morning.
The only honest element is the unacknowledged denial every other character is in about Brad's mental problems.Let me stress that no actor gets a chance to shine, no line of dialog rings true or will stay with you, nothing looks all that great and the grinding string music of the score sounds like something you'd play outside a convenience store to drive away loitering teenagers and small animals.
"My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?" stars Michael Shannon as Brad Macallum, who, as the movie opens, has just killed his widowed mother and is holed up in their flamingo-themed home, allegedly with two hostages.
Marcello Mastroianni Marlon Brando ETC All the greats go crazy.I was pleased to see the main character succeed in this effort.Michael Shannon is insane.I have no reference to other things he has done but My Son has to be it.The film is pure spectacle.It allows you interpretation and forces your engagement at the same time.It does all the things it should do.I like Herzog's quote about working with the RED as the only negative to this work is image quality."It's an immature camera created by computer people who do not have a sensibility or understanding for the value of high-precision mechanics, which has a 200-year history." Just don't blame it on Zeitlinger the DP.What a hipster concoction Lynch, Herzog, Chloe, Dafoe, Zabriskie and Uncle Teds Ostrich Farm are.I'm all for it..
Brad was in a play where the lead character kills his mother.
Film does have a conventional plot frame, but what the story is actually about is exploration of acts of a strange man.