Few filmmakers are as achingly earnest in their political views, and as deeply in touch with the soul of the proletariat, as Ken Loach is. If only we could just admire his movies without having to actually watch them.
But even Loach is capable of breaking out of his mold now and then, and he probably needs to. It's not an easy lot, being a devoted and prolific filmmaker who keeps making socially committed pictures that not many people see. (The Wind That Shakes the Barley, a grim and sometimes deeply affecting drama set during the Irish Civil War, won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2006, but you wouldn't exactly call it a crowdpleaser.) And so, with Looking for Eric, Loach tries his hand at comedy -- or at least a comedy of sorts. In this wry kitchen-sink fantasy, a down-on-his luck Manchester postal worker named Eric (Steve Evets) comes close to cracking up: His daughter has asked him to look after her baby daughter while she finishes up her degree.
But that means he'll be forced to have contact with the baby's fellow caretaker, his ex-wife Lily (Stephanie Bishop), whom he abandoned 30 years ago when their daughter was just an infant herself. Eric has never reckoned with his true feelings for Lily, nor has he ever really parsed for himself why he left her so abruptly and so cruelly. In the interim, he's been busy raising two boys (played by Gerard Kearns and Stephan Gumbs), the sons of the woman he married after leaving Lily. She's long gone, but the boys are now teenagers, and even though Eric loves them, they're making his life a living hell.
Eric is so disoriented that he nearly kills himself, or possibly someone else, going the wrong way on a roundabout, and his post-office pals -- led by the roly-poly, and aptly named, Meatballs, played by John Henshaw -- decide it's time for an intervention. But he also benefits from intervention of a more divine sort: Just as he's gazing at a poster of his hero, former Manchester United football star Eric Cantona, imploring him for advice, Cantona himself appears in his room, like the Virgin Mary in Bernadette's grotto. In his thick French accent Cantona -- who plays himself -- dispenses priceless words of advice, counseling Eric on the necessity of pulling his life together and urging him to be confident and assertive, instead of just the perennial hangdog pushover he's been for most of his life.
What's remarkable about Looking for Eric is the number of ways in which it almost works. The script is by Loach's frequent collaborator Paul Laverty, and though the story takes a while to get cooking -- and though Cantona, a charming and vital presence, disappears from it for stretches that go on too long -- it does throw off a few inspired sparks. That's largely thanks to the actors -- particularly Evets. The actor and sometime musician (for a time, he was a bass player in the Fall) has Harry Dean Stanton-style hollowed-out eyes; he plays Eric's hunched-over hopelessness as a kind of recurring joke, but it's easy enough to warm to him. Eric has cocked up his life tremendously, but as Evets plays him, you can see that he's yearning to change, especially as he rounds the bend of late middle age. (Eric is a youngish grandfather, as we're reminded in a flashback scene showing his and Lily's courtship: They meet at a dance, circa 1979, as teenagers bonding over their love for '50s rock and roll.)
In fact, the problems that slow down Looking for Eric have nothing to do with the bare bones of the story or with the acting (which is, across the board, low-key and quite lovely). It's simply that Loach has a hard time shaping material into the concise, effective moments you need to make comedy sing. In Loachland, scenes meander, stretching on for yonks, until we forget what the point was supposed to be in the first place. For a director so in tune with the plight of the common people, Loach has always lacked the common touch. His movies often seem willfully un-pretty -- he shows the hardships of life by making our eyes work overtime, with little visual payoff. In the world of Loach, cracked plaster passes for scenery, and we should be grateful for that much, dammit -- there are poor little children in other social strata who don't even know what plaster looks like. Even in Looking for Eric, Loach can't resist punishing us, or at least admonishing us, just a little bit. He sends the hapless, innocent Eric into the lair of some nasty young thugs, who set their slavering, jaw-snapping dog loose on him. Nothing terrible happens, but it's an example of the way Loach so often feels compelled to sour the tone of his material, to remind us that human beings (and some dogs) really are just nasty, worthless scum at heart.
Still, Loach is trying to be jaunty here, and every once in a while his efforts pay off: The movie's finale, in which Eric's post-office pals band together to solve one of his thorniest problems, shows a rare, rousing joie de vivre. And there's always Cantona, a pleasingly bearlike, wine-drinking, regular-guy philosopher who shows up at irregular intervals to loosen up the proceedings. The film was actually the football star's idea. Cantona, who played his final game in 1997, now works as an actor in France, and he'd wanted someone to make a picture about his relationship with his fans. He and the film's French co-producers thought an English director would be best, and Loach was their first choice.
Loach is a big football fan himself, and that informs Cantona's scenes. They sparkle more than anything else in the film; you can almost sense Loach twinkling from the other side of the camera. It doesn't matter if you've never heard of Cantona (I hadn't). His presence boosts the charm quotient of Looking for Eric considerably. And forget the Virgin Mary: If he can get Loach to crack a smile now and then, he's nothing short of a miracle worker.