Directed by: Werner Herzog
Written by: Herbert Golder, Werner Herzog
Cast: Willem Dafoe, Chloë Sevigny, Brad Dourif, Michael Shannon, Loretta Devine, Udo Kier, Michael Peña, Grace Zabriskie
Back in 1979, a young man named Mark Yavorsky was feeling rather down and out with the world. Yavorsky was a student of the University of San Diego, a star athlete, and had won awards for his acting at the university. Drama was the man's major as a grad student, and he had been recently cast in a prominent role in the campus rendition of Orestes, a Greek play about a young man who murders his mother with a sword in an act of brutal revenge.
Things appeared to be going well for Yavorsky, but the man was blue; so, he did what just about any of us would do. On June 10, 1979, Yavorsky marched across the street to a neighbor's home, where his elderly mother Mary Wathan was visiting, and stabbed her to death in front of shocked witnesses with an antique longsword. Wathan, upon being stabbed the first time, reportedly said, "Mark, you're killing your mother!" Further stabbings precluded additional comment.
The above is more than just a simple, albeit strange, synopsis for a film; it really happened. Werner Herzog's new film My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done is loosely based upon this tragic murder and follows the dark path of Yavorsky as his grasp on reality crumbles and the compulsive itch to kill his mother grows.
None of the backstory is a spoiler. My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done feels like it has the expectation that any viewer has already heard at least some of the details of the real world case. As it opens, the murder has just gone down, and a raving Brad McCullum (Yavorsky's fictional counterpart) has locked himself in his home and claims to hold hostages. The police form a barricade outside of his home and begin to investigate their options. They interview McCullum's girlfriend, his old drama professor, and the distraught neighbor who witnessed the attack, and through their stories they begin to get a picture of the man they are dealing with.
It is these stories, told by those close to McCullum, that provide much of the film. These police interviews always summon flashbacks, though there are also flashback sequences of which only McCullum would know. We're shown his fascination with ostriches (referred to as "dinosaurs in drag"), his search for enlightenment in Peru, his work as a stage actor, and his misbehavior with his girlfriend. All of this, I suppose, is there to provide some sort of arc, some sort of buildup, to the final repugnant act of stabbing his own mother to death.
But, it doesn't. This is one of the main things wrong with My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done; there does not appear to be a discernable character arc. McCullum is crazy as a boat full of ferrets in entirely every scene of the film. The man is one step shy of making racecars out of his own poop. He's obviously very intelligent, but is also plagued with a profound self-aggrandizing center-of-the-world viewpoint that makes him an intense bore. He's also plagued with being nucking futs, and often behaves like a shambling homeless arguing out loud with invisible demons. His final act of killing his own mother doesn't really seem like the end of a buildup of tension; rather, it seems like any other stupidly crazy thing McCullum might do, and is only by happenstance more violent than the rest of his psychosis.
Herzog keeps his focus more on the man, rather than the contemptible and easily sensationalized murder of McCullum's own mother. The murder itself is never shown; nor do we even see her body after the slaying. I don't recall a single speck of blood in the entire film. The murder scene is recounted by the shocked neighbor who witnessed it all, and then shown as a flashback which stops moments before the first fatal blow is dealt.
Herzog goes for a more surreal, non sequitur, approach than in many of his other films, so much that the overall product feels more like something that would come from David Lynch. The connection isn't superficial; Lynch is the producer of this film, though Herzog and others have said that his influence ended at the money. Still, these awkward and absurd moments strongly echo Lynch's style, and they also do nothing at all to help the film in any form.
These surreal moments manifest in overly long and awkward shots of the actors doing nothing at all, frozen in place. One particular lingering shot occurs after McCullum and his uncle have a peculiar conversation regarding the possibilities of having a midget ride a rooster. The scene freezes at its end, with McCullum, his uncle, and said imaginary tuxedo wearing midget staring directly into the camera while the Spanish language background music swells. They stay like that, frozen, silly, for perhaps 20 seconds. When I saw this scene, I thought the midget was supposed to be singing the Spanish song; now I'm not really sure anymore. I'm also not really sure of the point behind this scene, or of the others like it. I suppose they are trying to demonstrate McCullum's slipping grasp of reality, but frankly they lacked any engaging aesthetic and became a tiresome and pretentious bore.
This isn't entirely a "true crime" biopic. Facts where changed for the film - the most obvious being Yavorsky's name being changed to Brad McCullum. The victim's last words were also changed to "My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done"; I suppose "Brad, You're Killing Your Mother" just wasn't title-worthy.
There are many other manipulations and, it should be mentioned, Herzog has never denied fictionalizing many parts of the story. McCullum, like his crazy real life counterpart, was also a part of a University production of Orestes, which provided the unfortunate foreshadowing of a son who stabs his own mother to death. To make things apt in the film, McCullum plays the mother-slaying Orestes; but the archived news report from May of 1979 (a mere month before the murder took place) shows that real world lunatic Yavorsky only played the supporting role of Agamemnon, Orestes' father.
But this is a little beside the point - it is easy to become distracted by the reality of the case when the film itself fails to be fulfilling. Herzog has provided an 
excellent snapshot of a truly troubled soul, but he fails to show us what brought McCullum to such a loathsome condition. My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done does not illuminate on the nature of McCullum's insanity, nor does it really provide any real understanding or insight behind his murderous actions. No one will go away from this film understanding McCullum's crime any more than they went into it, which makes the entire premise a little senseless. The act of staring into the abyss is motivated by a desire to explore, and this film fails to ever light a torch.
Rating: (2.5 out of 5):
