My Son delights in bad behavior

My son, My son What have Ye Done

Opened Jan. 29 at Alamo Drafthouse Ritz

Roger Ebert has a rule that states "no movie featuring either Harry Dean Stanton or M. Emmet Walsh in a supporting role can be altogether bad." It's about time someone added Willem Dafoe to that list.  In legendary German director Werner Herzog's latest film, My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done, Dafoe uses his impressive abilities to be a stabilizing anchor in a purposefully unhinged film.

Dafoe plays it straight as Hank Havenhurst, an L.A. homicide detective struggling to comprehend what leads Brad McCullum (Michael Shannon) to murder his mother and enter into an armed standoff with the police.

In between tense exchanges with Shannon, Dafoe interviews his fiance (Chloe Sevigny) and friend (Udo Kier.) As the flashbacks unfold, it soon becomes clear that Shannon's sanity as been deteriorating for some time, and his erratic behavior gives Herzog ample room to add strange, surreal flourishes to what could have been a straightforward film. 
Presented by David Lynch, whatever "presented" means, My Son, My Son walks the delicate line between Hollywood simplicity and art house obliqueness.  The usual strangeness one would find in a Lynch or Herzog film is here: diminutive actors, purposefully stiff acting, metacommentary on the film's themes, and strange rambling asides about giant roosters and other such nonsense.

In a more traditional art film, those flourishes would eventually derail the narrative, leaving a muddled ending and confused audience. But My Son, My Son, keeps returning to Dafoe and the armed standoff with Shannon, giving it a center of gravity and a more linear structure.

In contrast to Willem Dafoe's grounded stability, Michael Shannon imbues his character with an unnerving edge that brims over with manic intensity.  A traumatic experience in Peru left Shannon convinced that he should follow the voice inside him, and living with his overbearing, flamingo obsessed mother certainly didn't help matters.  Most of the film takes place in flashbacks related by Sevigny and Kier, who stood by helpless and confused as Shannon's grasp of reality unraveled before them.

Shannon's unusual passions and delirious speeches sync perfectly with Herzog's artistic intrusions. There are moments in the film when time slows down or the actors awkwardly freeze, and Herzog builds them into a frenzy with choice selections from obscure musicians like Caetano Velooso, Washington Philips, and Chavela Vargas.

Though it lacks the iguana cam, break dancing ghosts, and the crack smoking Nicolas Cage of Herzog's recent reworking of Bad Lieutenant, both films share a similar sensibility.  Though disguised as more traditional fare, Herzog smuggles in an element of straight-faced insanity, like the one exhibited by Shannon, that stares you down and dares you to question it.

My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done treads the thin line between chaos and order, and then personifies those qualities in the fantastic performances of Michael Shannon and Willem Dafoe.  Shannon's captivating craziness might be what makes the film soar, but it is the underrated Dafoe who keeps things from falling apart.