Looking For Eric

Synopsis: Middle-aged postman, Eric Bishop (Steve Evets) is struggling to stay on top of things. A single dad, he has two teenage stepsons to deal with but even worse, he has re-connected with Lily (Stephanie Bishop), the wife he walked out on 30 years previously after their daughter asks them to share child-minding duties for their grand-daughter. The only person he can talk to is one-time Manchester United football legend, Eric Cantona.

Veteran English director, Ken Loach, has made the British working (and not-working) class his home turf and has a portfolio of many fine films that empathetically display their day-to-day lot. Since The Navigators (2001) he has honed his film-making style to balance crowd-pleasing entertainment (read “box-office requirements”) with more biting socio-political commentary. Looking For Eric continues to use this template but unlike his previous films it feels contrived, incongruously mixing a Hollywood-like fantasy about self-belief and the triumph of the underdog with yet another foray to the slop-filled kitchen sink.   

It is not however the device of giving Eric the postman an improbable spiritual advisor in Eric the footballer that is the problem so much as the narrative which frames his life-changing experiences. When one of Eric’s shiftless stepsons gets involved with a local thug, Eric the down-trodden is forced to save the day with the help of 3 busloads of his mates. Loach does realism very well but here he and long-time collaborator, writer Paul Laverty, come up with a scenario that is at best, glib, and, if it weren’t for the “yer f**kn’ c**t” swearing, would be derided as Hollywood at itx most superficial. And frankly, after a multitude of films set in the lower reaches of British society, the charms of overweight Poms with rubbish clothes and bad haircuts and oiks with shaven heads and bad attitudes has well and truly worn off.  

Evets makes for an engagingly diffident central character but there is simply not enough substance in this film to take him credibly beyond his "wot the f**k" condition of powerlessness. When they start offering magic as a cure for life's problems it feels like time for Loach and Laverty to try some new ground.

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