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Yavorsky -- renamed Brad McCullum -- would have made a fine addition to the chorus line of amazing creatures that he has profiled in his documentaries but, seeing as the German eccentric has admitted that the film is 70% fiction, he obviously saw more of a chance for narrative malfeasance. We first meet McCullum, played by a dedicated Michael Shannon, standing in a crowd outside his own crime scene, greeting two congenial detectives (Willem Dafoe and Michael Peña) with the words 'Razzle Dazzle'em.' By the time a neighbor (Irma P. Hall) informs the detectives that Brad is the murderer, he has already taken up inside his house with a shotgun and two hostages.
Herzog flips from the hostage scene to clips of McCullum's gestating madness as they first started to bubble to the surface. His fiancée Ingrid (Chloë Sevigny, who else?) says he changed after a kayaking trip to Peru, where several of his friends drowned. A botched plan to play Orestes in a staging of Sophocles' Electra under an impossibly patient director (Udo Kier, restrained somehow) leads towards quite the scene at a VA hospital where he throws a tantrum over not being allowed to tend to the sick; it closes with a hectic attempt to buy all the throw pillows that the gift shop has to offer.
The fact that Grace Zabriskie plays McCullum's mother is the first but hardly the strongest signifier of the involvement of executive producer David Lynch. Indeed, the film volleys between flickers of absurd solipsism and warped variations on the hostage procedural, rebuking coherence at every turn and collecting non-sequiturs as if they were stuffed animals. But despite what many perceived as a dream-team scenario with Lynch playing Ishmael to Herzog's Ahab, the pairing favors blunt discordance without the immersive power implicit in either's peculiar cinematic persona.
Herzog's film, like his central character, certainly doesn't mind swimming past the breakers; seeing God in an oatmeal box and allowing for the homophobic ramblings of McCullum's Uncle Ted (Brad Dourif). There's even a midget in a tuxedo lest you lose your bearings. Initially, this hearty ladle of lunacy feels refreshing but the script, written by Herzog and Herbert Golder, lacks any sign of tone and certainly doesn't invoke the dedication to character that Shannon shows. As Shannon plays him, McCullum lacks any concept of what the world has deemed acceptable; 'so what?' he replies when Ingrid points out that the house he plans to buy her is already spoken for. No one needs to point out how this might reflect on the two artists responsible for My Son, My Son but neither seem interested in exploring that avenue, finding themselves as fixated on the insanity of their shaggy-haired protagonist as he is with variations on his beloved pet flamingos.
