A mashup of Nick Hornby and Martin Scorsese? Why not?
With its oddball mix of crime, athlete worship and middle-aged soul reappraisal, the UK’s “Looking for Eric” looks like an ideal property to be remade by Hollywood — starring, say, Adam Sandler and Charles Barkley.
Postman Eric Bishop has lost his wife, his ability to reason with his porn-loving teenage sons, and possibly his mind. Regaining the first two (if not the third) begins when he starts having imaginary conversations with his favorite soccer player — the poet in cleats Eric Cantona (who plays himself).
Cantona, whose gnomic utterances off the field were as entertaining as his thundering play alongside David Beckham for Manchester United in the 1990s, is not an actor. Dealing with his muddy French accent adds to the burden of decoding the rest of the cast’s prickly Mancunian, which itself isn’t ‘alf ‘ard to oonderstand.
Still, 73-year-old director Ken Loach, who normally delivers harsh messages and helps them down with a spoonful of drain cleaner, finds moments of off-kilter charm in Eric’s chats with Eric. Much of the credit must go to Steve Evets, who plays Eric the postman with a crusty, unshowy appeal. When driven mad by yet another in a succession of unwanted houseguests, he beats the teen with a pillow until the air fills with down feathers — a nice illustration of his fluffy, unscary anger.
Cantona counsels a mixture of tough love and forgiveness to the postman, who through his baby granddaughter finds himself once again on speaking terms with the wife (a sweet Stephanie Bishop, wounded and cautious) he walked out on more than 20 years earlier without apparent cause.
Just as he begins to collect the pieces of their broken history, though, he finds a gun in the house. Background and foreground suddenly trade places, and Eric’s teen sons no longer look like boneless layabouts but sources of real danger given their ties to a local hoodlum.
The way Loach toggles back and forth between airy fantasy and rubbed-in realism is jarring — a Hollywood version would, of course, give everything a thick chocolatey coating of sentimentalism — but it’s an astute way to keep the audience on edge and wondering which way the switch will finally flip.
To me, Loach makes the right choice: For such a small film, the payoff is surprisingly large.