The Essentials: The Films Of Werner Herzog

“The Wild Blue Yonder” (2005)
A rare example of a swing and a miss from Herzog, “The Wild Blue Yonder” is a rather tedious recontextualization of a lot of documentary footage, much of it from NASA, into a ginormous interstellar shaggy dog story. Starring a windswept and wild-eyed Brad Dourif as an alien who came to earth when his own planet underwent an ice age, the film relies too much on archive footage that now feels somewhat familiar and on live action filmed scenes that seem calculatedly banal (mousy men writing incomprehensible equations on whiteboards; Dourif speaking to camera in abandoned, broken-down locales). Dourif himself is well-cast and the film finds itself in some of his speeches, but while the story he describes is intermittently interesting, especially where it intersects with known human history (Roswell; the CIA; aviation pioneers) eventually it does start to feel like listening to the railing of a crazy guy on the street: his delusion may be detailed and comprehensively imagined, but it’s never convincing. Allied to a trancy soundtrack of wailing vocals and drones the film has a lethargic, soporific quality—odd that the unearthliness and sense of alien wonder that Herzog so often can impart should be absent from his one film about a literal alien. [C-]

“Rescue Dawn” (2007)
Christian Bale’s emaciated turn in Brad Anderson’s “The Machinist” signaled a turning point for the skilled actor, but also raised questions about the brutality of his method acting. Which is perhaps where Herzog identified a kinship, since he cast Bale as Dieter Dengler in the narrative recreation of a topic he’d broached before with the real Mr. Dengler in 1997’s “Little Dieter Needs To Fly.” The resulting film is perhaps not as narratively taut as we’d like, but in depicting the capture of Dengler after being shot down and the POW relations, Herzog hits a sweet spot, once again exploring how men function under extreme conditions, pitted against not just their fellow man but antagonistic nature too. Bale hits all of his marks, but it’s Steve Zahn (along with, to a lesser degree, Jeremy Davies) who really resonates, delivering a complete about-face from his frequent doofus sidekick roles, to reveal Duane W. Martin as perhaps the film’s most touching character: an emotionally fragile but kind-hearted man inspired by Dengler to try for freedom. [B]

“Encounters at the End of the World” (2007)
“Who were the people I was going to meet in Antarctica at the end of the world? What were their dreams?” Herzog sets up early on that his Antarctica doc ain’t no “March of the Penguins.” Indeed he makes that explicit with a shot of one doomed penguin walking determinedly, it seems, in the wrong direction, away from the crowd toward certain, isolated death. Filmed with a tiny crew consisting only of Herzog and cinematographer Peter Zeitlinger, ‘Encounters‘ was shot almost entirely on the fly in a short seven weeks and is delivered in an observational diary style, rather than anything more typically narrative-driven or shaped, though Herzog’s glorious, deadpan narration helps to string it together. But as fascinated as he is by the strangeness of the people living above-ground around the makeshift McMurdo Station, some of the most beautiful and poetic moments are found in the long underwater shots, the uncanny alien world that lies just beneath the surface. It’s not simply a nature doc, or even an anthropological one, it’s far more philosophical, even ontological, than that—and is occasionally breathtaking for its ideas as well as its images even if it doesn’t quite rank among the director’s best.[B]

“Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans” (2009)
Cleaving Playlist opinion down the middle, Werner Herzog’s most atypical project is definitely best enjoyed as a Herzog film, rather than as a genre movie that happens to be from an auteur director, because anyone approaching it with ideas that the Hollywood star and generic setting are going to make for a less weird Herzog experience is going to be soundly disappointed. Ostensibly a sequel/remake of Abel Ferrera‘s “Bad Lieutenant,” this film however retains none of that film’s stars, story or even tone instead casting Nicolas Cage, Eva Mendes and Val Kilmer in a completely gonzo, inexplicable detective story that has Herzog’s camera often wander away from the action to focus on a lizard on a rock or some alligators or something. It’s far from Herzog’s best, being an incoherent marriage of generic thriller with quasi-metaphysical who-knows-what, but wild as it is, it’s a fascinating watch for the Herzog aficionado if only for the sense of looking through his eyes. Rightly or wrongly, we’ve always felt that Herzog thinks he is being normal here, and that puts his effort of similar genre tales like “Lethal Weapon” or a “Die Hard.” Delirious, awkward and featuring one of the most outre Nicolas Cage performances in recent memory (“shoot him again, his soul’s still dancing”) ‘Port of Call‘ absolutely doesn’t do what it says on the tin, but has rewards in store for anyone who goes in prepared for a huge heaping portion of crazy. [B-]

“My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done” (2009)
Mix David Lynch (here exec producer) and Werner Herzog, and you’re bound to get something that peers straight into the darkness, and finds the darkness peering back. And as a result, this serio-comic horror picture, the second of two 2009 dalliances with genre territory that take pleasure in disappointing all genre expectations, follows a delusional man (Michael Shannon) who acts out the seminal stage play “Oresteia” by murdering his mother with an antique saber, and touches on some very unexpected notes. Herzog seems less interested in the gruesomeness and transparent evil at the heart of this true story, and instead focuses on how the man’s actions created his own little sub-community, where the cops interact with a host of people who influenced his earlier, progressively more unhinged days. While there can never be another Kinski, Shannon steps up admirably in a performance guided by the intellectual curiosity of a demon, his flat facial features contrasted against possibly the most expressive brow in Hollywood, the character actor morphing into a leading-man force of nature before us. While he can be casual and deadly, it’s Shannon at his most relaxed that appears most fearsome, as if he is coiled up, and best prepared to strike. How he will strike is Herzog’s crafty, gleefully demented secret. [B-]

“Cave of Forgotten Dreams” (2010)
Despite receiving some of the most breathless accolades given to a documentary in recent years (it wasn’t solely the 3D surcharge that made it the most lucrative documentary of all time on its release) “Cave of Forgotten Dreams” left us a lot cooler, and lot less engaged than many of Herzog’s other documentaries. An undoubtedly intelligent and well-intentioned exploration of the ancient caves in which were discovered some of the earliest ever cave paintings, dating back some 30,000 years, the wonder of that discovery wears off rather early and that, along with the occasionally queasy effect of the 3D, conspired to let our attention wander. But perhaps most detrimental of all to our enjoyment was the strange straight-up reverence that Herzog delivers here—there are but few of his trademark digressions (which are so often more fascinating that the subject under discussion) and he largely leaves it up to the interviewed experts to provide (dry and sometimes academic) context. Rarely does Herzog’s innate solemnity come across as anything but grand, but here it feels hemmed in and resolutely small-scale despite the extra dimension and the enormous span of time (all of human history nearly) that he’s dealing in. We’re not sure Herzog’s physically capable of turning in an uninteresting film, but ‘Cave’ is certainly one of his less involving. [C+]