My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done

Actually, My Son seems more like an extension of Herzog’s recent documentaries, which often toy with the idea of what’s “real” by including awkward reenactments and blatantly staged interviews. Golder’s dialogue in My Son is periodically hackneyed and occasionally hyperbolic (as when one of Shannon’s friends warns him, “Only faggots and Negroes with attitude become actors”), and the cast seems to have been instructed to speak at a discordant pitch. When Zabriskie is emotional, Shannon reverts to monotone; when Sevigny is muted, Shannon gets extra-freaky. At one point, when thunder and lightning interrupt an intense Shannon monologue, he starts over with the exact same inflection. It’s all… not quite right.

What is Herzog up to? Well, it seems significant that Shannon aspires to be an actor (going so far as to watch a Greek tragedy, and reciting along with the lead actor in full voice, from the audience), and there’s definitely an extra layer of meaning to the climactic scene where Shannon places a basketball in a spindly tree, silhouetted against the San Diego skyline. My Son seems to explore that mix of the synthetic with the natural, the iconoclastic and the expected. But it’s undeniably a bumpy trip. While watching Shannon talk to his pet flamingoes or tote around an embroidered pillow that reads “M Is For Mom, Not Maid,” viewers will have to decide for themselves whether My Son is a terrible, terrible movie or an uncompromising Herzog experiment in reality-bending. Here’s a suggestion: consider the track record.