Edinburgh International Film Festival: My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? | The Kid | HIGH School | Obselidia | The Good Heart

Published on Tuesday 22 June 2010 21:07

AFTER the full-on wigged-out lunacy of Bad Lieutenant, Werner Herzog revisits the police procedural with a more sedate slice of crazy in My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? (***).

Apparently inspired by a true story of matricide, it's the strange tale of Brad McCullum (Michael Shannon), a stage actor who barricades himself in his San Diego home with a couple of hostages mere minutes after slaying his mother (Grace Zabriskie) with an antique sword. As he communicates with the police via cryptic messages involving religion

and cereal boxes, it's left to his fiance (Chlo Sevigny) and his old theatre director (Udo Kier) to fill in the blanks as they relate Brad's story to the detective in charge (played by a typically off-kilter Willem Dafoe).

Though effectively a Greek tragedy, albeit a bizarre and humorous one, as you'd expect from Herzog it's really a tale of one man's descent into madness, with Shannon supplying the Klaus Kinski-esque crazy eyes, and scene-stealing cameos from flamingos and ostriches supplying the surreal flourishes that made Bad Lieutenant such a blast. In a little homage to his own best-known work, Herzog even sets part of the film in Peru, the location of Aguirre, Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo.

What the film lacks, however, is that fully immersive quality that Herzog's work often has. As the film meanders back and forth between the various accounts of Brad's life and the investigation into the sequence of events immediately preceding his mother's murder, the film winks a little too forcefully at the audience, perhaps in tribute to the film's executive producer, David Lynch, whose recent output has bordered on self-parody.

It's a minor work, then, but even a minor work from Herzog offers enough incidental pleasures to make it worth seeking out.

It's certainly more valid than the rest of today's EIFF offerings, the worst of which is The Kid (*), a thoroughly wretched film adapted from Kevin Lewis's best-selling misery memoir detailing his struggle to survive not only a horribly abusive childhood but also a subsequent descent into the British criminal underworld.

It's the sort of triumph-over-extreme-adversity tale that could have made for a harrowing but inspirational piece of drama had it been written and directed with more grace and skill. Instead, the screenplay, which Lewis adapted himself with "additional writing" from director Nick Moran, is a collection of mind-numbingly banal insights and hackneyed platitudes built around the details of his horrifying upbringing. Moran, whose directorial choices mostly consist of endless montages scored to cheesy classical music or anachronistic pop songs, attempts to give the story some social context by linking the struggles of its protagonist (played by Rupert Friend) to the dominance of Thatcherism and the rise of unfettered greed, but the effects are laboured and the film never delivers a true sense of the period.

It doesn't help that the characters come across a gallery of grotesques, with Natascha McElhone donning blackened teeth and NHS glasses to play Kevin's violent, loveless mother as if she were doing a parody of a Mike Leigh caricature. To make matters worse, Moran chooses to end the film with footage of the real Lewis in a tearful interview with Fern Britton, just to underscore how real it all is, presumably because the preceding film does such a lousy job of making it ring true.

Almost as bad is HIGH School (*), a tedious US stoner comedy, the punning title of which supplies its one not-very-funny joke. After their officious high school principal (The Shield's Michael Chiklis) introduces random drug testing for students, tenuous best friends Henry (Matt Bush) and Travis (Sean Marquette) decide to get the entire school stoned on hash brownies in an effort to avoid ruining Henry's scholarship chances after an out-of-character dalliance with pot. With none of the charm, wit or smarts of the likes of Pineapple Express or the Harold & Kumar films, this seems geared towards fans of late period Kevin Smith movies only.

Finally today there's a pair of US indie quirk-fests with a Scottish connection. The best is Obselidia (***), the debut feature by Scottish writer/director Diane Bell, which is based on a lovely idea that the prosaic script can't do justice. It's the story of George (Michael Piccirilli), a librarian whose obsessive attempt to compile his encyclopaedia of obsolete things – the titular Obselidia – is blinding him to the fact that life is for living, something live-wire silent cinema projectionist Sophie (Gaynor Howe) hopes to rectify. Though filled with nice touches, its curious nostalgia is a bit precious and Bell falls into that trap of paying tribute to herself by having her characters rhapsodise over things in the script that, sorry, aren't all that profound or beautiful.

Still, at least she has a distinctive visual style. The Good Heart (**), on the other hand, is the sort of cookie-cutter indie film that turns up at every festival every year. Brian Cox stars as Jacques, a misanthropic-on-the-outside New York bar owner with a heart condition. He takes in Lucas (Paul Dano), a suicidal homeless man so thankful about failing in his attempt to take his own life that he readily signs up for a hospital's organ donation programme. Plot twist duly telegraphed, the film kills time reaching it with lots of meaningless digressions involving ducks and bar-room philosophising courtesy of characters with all the depth of a shot glass. Time please.

&149 My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?, Filmhouse, tonight, 9:50pm and Friday, 5:55pm; The Kid, Cineworld, tonight, 8:35pm and tomorrow, 6pm; HIGH School, Cineworld, tonight, 6:15pm; Obselidia, Filmhouse, tonight, 9pm; The Good Heart, Cineworld, tonight, 6pm and tomorrow, 8:30pm.