'Hello Herman' stars The Walking Dead's Norman Reedus. And, I confess, that was my primary motivation for watching it. There's a few things of his I would like to watch, but the vast majority of his back catalogue isn't available through any of the legitimate streaming services I subscribe to. Perhaps due to the fact they are mainly independent films which had a limited enough release when they were new. His appearances in the more mainstream films which are available through those services tend to be brief - sometimes limited to one scene - although I haven't regretted watching any of those films because of that (2).
In 'Hello Herman' he takes a leading role. He plays a journalist, Lax, who is invited by the titular Herman to tell his side of the story: in which he burst into his high school and shot a number of his fellow students. As Lax interviews Herman through his video camera, we are shown a series of flashbacks depicting the events in Herman's life that led up to the shooting and the lengths that it appears Lax is willing to go to for a good story. These little insights raise a lot of questions... and we are given very few answers.
'Hello Herman' garnered some terrible reviews. It's a rotten tomato (3). Most of the bad reviews seem to focus on the fact the film doesn't offer answers to the difficult questions it poses, although even these tend to praise both Reedus' performance and that of Garrett Backstrom, who plays Herman. This is not a negative review. I loved it.
Vanity Fair's Sam Kashner called it "a powerful and important work, a darkly brilliant tone poem about America's tango with violence and fame." Danny Miller of MSN movies described it as "a powerful film that should be required viewing for adolescents everywhere". 'Hello Herman' reminded me of two other equally controversial films - albeit ones with significantly better ratings on the tomato-ometer - which addressed similar subject matters, namely 'We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011) and American History X (1998). I've spent a little time trawling through the reviews for all three and it has struck me that much of the criticism levied at 'Hello Herman' was hurled at these two films as well - that they're just controversial, that they don't really explain the characters' motivations, that they fail to reach any sort of satisfactory conclusion. I think the reviewers who say this have missed the point. The point of films like this, isn't to offer answers - fuck, if a film could offer us the answers to problems like this we'd be laughing! That's not the role of films like this, their job is merely to get us to think about the problem, to ask the questions that we don't dare to, not to provide the answers.
The director of 'Hello Herman', Michelle Danner, responded to its critics on the film's official website, explaining that her motivation for making the film was "to start the conversation". She noted that, after each school shooting that America endures, "nothing changes."
Another film 'Hello Herman' reminded me of was 'Bowling for Columbine' (2002), Michael Moore's compelling documentary about the Columbine High School massacre in 1999. The thing which has stuck with me the most about that film is simple numbers: America has the highest level of gun violence in the world, but likes to blame anything but the prevalence of guns for this. Some recent stories that have resulted in me agreeing with Piers Morgan (4) include:
And in the midst of all this, Donald Trump suggested that the victims of the Charlie Hebdo shootings in France - which has strict gun control - might "have had a fighting chance" if they'd had guns... twat (5).
'Hello Herman' doesn't take an anti-gun stance. It doesn't seek to blame bullying, video games, the Internet or any of the other things that seem to have led up to Herman's violent, fatal outburst. It presents them as pieces of the bigger picture that so many who have seen it and spoken so negatively about it seem to have missed. But, as I said, even they recognised that incredible performance by Norman Reedus.
'Hello Herman' was shot in 2011 whilst Reedus was on a break from filming The Walking Dead. He said that the film's subject matter "struck a chord" with him as the father of a then ten-year-old son. His performance is beautifully understated and naturalistic. Now, I've read an interview in which Reedus implies he took acting lessons before starting work on this film - Michelle Danner is also an acting coach (6). If I hadn't already watched his debut. 'Floating' (1997) earlier in the day, I might have just believed that he did perhaps need them given that, prior to seeing these two films, the only film I'd watched where he'd had anything like that substantial a role was the lamentable 'Messengers 2' (2009) (7). I did have to laugh at one review though. It said "he's given many opportunities to squint and look troubled," which reminded me of something Reedus said himself: "when I first started acting, I was really insecure. I glared at a lot of people... somehow that scowl has turned into an acting career." Start as you mean to go on, they say. If it ain't broke don't fix it, they say. His performance - debut performance - in 'Floating' is similarly understated. It's a lovely little film and, whilst it doesn't have anything new to say about teenage angst that wasn't said in every film about teenage angst that preceded it, it handles the (unsurprising) revelation of one character's homosexuality particularly deftly, with a subtlety that very few of those other films did.
I digress. 'Hello Herman' struck a chord with me. One review I read said it's the sort of film that stays with you and I have been thinking about it pretty much constantly since I saw it. It's not just the subject matter, it's not Norman Reedus' performance - Garrett Backstrom as Herman is simply mesmerising and Michelle Danner's turn as his mother is also very good. The film is set "in the not too distant future" and the interview footage and flashbacks are interspersed with satirical news footage, which reminded me of 'Starship Troopers' (1997), which is also severely misunderstood and lambasted as a result (8). The soundtrack is also rather fabulous, with Olivia Faye's 'You Didn't See Me' and Adam Whittington's 'Make the World Love Again' catchy exit music earworms both conveying the film's anti-bullying message in a sweet, positive way that - perhaps surprisingly - doesn't feel at odds with the otherwise dark tone of the film they close out.
In doing the little bit of background research that I did for this post, I discovered the film was a total box office bomb. That's a shame. I hope it develops a cult following. It might take years for people to properly 'get' it, like it did 'Starship Troopers', but it deserves to. Despite the lack of answers, the anti-bullying message is clear. It's the sort of film that should be shown in schools to make kids think about the potential impact of their behaviour on their peers, but I have a sneaking suspicion the people in charge of deciding such things will decide that it's too violent, too controversial, that our children aren't capable of seeing it as a thinkpiece and will just go out and copy it. Those are probably the same people who blamed Marilyn Manson for Columbine. Manson was asked by Michael Moore what he would say to the Columbine shooters if he had the chance. He said "I wouldn't... I would listen to what they have to say, and that's what no-one did." There's a wonderful sequence in 'Hello Herman' where Herman is describing his favourite film, 'Kids' (1995), to Lax. It was an equally controversial film featuring a group of young people doing the sort of thing parents don't want (or, as Herman points out, don't want to know) their kids do, like have unprotected sex and do drugs. He comments that that's "really what it's like". Lax reminds him the film was set in the 1990s and Herman says that "kids are like that all over... we always do what you think we're incapable of doing until you notice us" - the film's other obvious message is that parent's need to connect with their children. For me, that's not about telling kids what to do, or what not to do. It's about listening to what they have to say. 'Hello Herman' is a film that has something to say and it's definitely worth listening to.
Note:
I don't do star ratings or marks out of ten. I have tried to rate films in this way in the past. I found myself having to go back and change them all the fucking time as I watched ones that eclipsed all those I'd seen previously either in terms of brilliance or sheer fucking awfulness. It now feels wrong to me to compare things that are completely different in terms of tone and content on the same arbitrary sliding scale. Whilst I may draw comparisons to other films I have seen it's solely to point out similarities, not to judge quality.
Footnotes:
(1) Unless you are Nigel... naughty Nigel....
(2) With the exception of Pandorum. It's fucking shit.
(7) I don't mean to be overly critical of Norman Reedus' performance in this film - I'd slap anyone who tried suggest he must've used Cuprinol instead of aftershave - but it's nevertheless an utter turd of a film and his best efforts in its better moments can't stop him being dragged back into the shitty abyss by the next ridiculous scene. It somehow feels horribly disloyal to say that but the other four films I've seen since (including the two I've mentioned above) have proved to me that this was an inexplicable blip on an otherwise impressive CV, which includes his brief turn in '8MM' (1999) where he owns the screen whilst Nicolas Cage just stands there like part of the scenery.
