Ken Loach (2009)

The tension between Paul Laverty’s screenplay and its treatment by Ken Loach is sometimes disorienting, always entertaining.  Laverty’s script is basically conventional:  it’s about a middle-aged man regretting his past and approaching the end of his tether.  Eric is a Manchester postman, angry and depressed.  He walked out on his teenage bride Lily twenty-odd years back, when she was pregnant with their daughter.  His second wife walked out on Eric a few years ago, leaving him with two late teenage stepsons, who spend most of their days in bed and/or watching television and/or porn films.  One of the boys is minding a gun for a local gangster.  Eric’s den in the house, a haven of relative orderliness, is a shrine to Manchester United and to his particular hero, Eric Cantona.  (The set decoration for this room is effortlessly right; in comparison, a skew-whiff Venetian blind in the kitchen looks too arranged.)  The screenplay is put together without much skill or imagination in order to engineer a happy ending out of Eric’s unpromising situation.   But Laverty has had the bright idea of inserting into the story a whimsical, fantastical element:  one night, Eric, desperate to calm his mind, smokes a joint and receives a visitation from Cantona (the first of several), who proves to be as resourcefully original as an agony aunt as he was on the football field.    Except in a few good comedy sequences, the dialogue isn’t up to much:  it veers between the monotonously profane and the impersonally over-explicit.  The fusillades of ‘fuckings’ sometimes (especially in the climactic sequence) have the ring less of truth than of hollow efforts at improvisation.  When Eric explains how he really feels to Cantona or to Lily (he starts seeing her again via the division of child-minding responsibilities for their granddaughter Daisy – as their daughter Sam completes a degree as a mature student), he sounds not like the individual we believe in when he’s talking with his workmates but like a standard issue character in a what-happened-to-my-life story.

Ken Loach’s ability to dramatise material in a way that feels real makes for some emotionally dynamic and powerfully upsetting sequences.  The trouble is that, once Loach has delivered one of these moments, his reversion to the heartwarming progress of Laverty’s plot exposes the screenplay all the more starkly as clumsy and mechanical.  Lily, Sam and Daisy come round to Eric for a meal – cooked by Jess, the feckless but essentially affectionate stepson (the boys are evidently fathered by different men).  Ryan, the obstreperous stepson who’s looking after the gangster’s gun, watches resentfully.  Eric, painfully fearful that his growing rapprochement with Lily and Ryan’s deepening involvement with the gangster Zac are going to collide disastrously, goes from the family table into the kitchen and Lily follows him.  Standing at the sink, he nearly breaks down.  When she asks what’s wrong, he says, ‘You know, it’s just the boys … but we’ll get through’.  What’s not being said is palpable in the atmosphere; you expect an explosion, but at a domestic level.  When the tension is broken by an eruption of banging and shouting, it’s the police, presumably with a tip-off that there are firearms in the house – within seconds, Eric and Lily are lying face down on the kitchen floor handcuffed.  We see them and Sam being bundled into police cars and Daisy taken away.  Loach cuts to the police station, where everything’s relatively quiet.  Lily asks Eric whether there was a gun in the house – he lies to her, she knows he’s lying, and he knows she knows.  A friendly policeman announces that a car will take them home.  Back at the house, Eric reveals to Ryan and Jess where he’d hidden the gun:  it’s the stuffing in the chicken which was going to be the main course the family never got round to.  It’s incredible that this terrifying experience wouldn’t leave such a mark on Lily (and Sam) as to make it well nigh impossible to restore her relationship with Eric.  Not only is a (seen but not heard) explanation to Lily, from Jess and Ryan, enough for her instantly to forgive and forget; it also sets up a transformation of both stepsons complete enough for them to slip easily into a happy family finale at Sam’s graduation ceremony.  It’s not just that I didn’t believe this conclusion.  I didn’t want to believe it – because it betrayed what I took to be the truth of what had gone before.  Loach seems as willing as Laverty to ignore the traumatic backlog – he does so as blithely as the pleasant policeman at the station ignored what his colleagues had just done at Eric’s house.

It’s something of a puzzle as to why Ken Loach was drawn to this story (according to Wikipedia, he supports Bath City FC).  Part of the appeal was no doubt the opportunities the material gave Loach to express his political views and his admiration for working-class camaraderie.  The police raid is one such opportunity but lower-key moments are the highlights of Looking for Eric.  His colleague Meatballs gets other workmates to try and make Eric feel better – by telling him desperate (funny) jokes and, in the film’s best scene (and its adumbration of the meetings of the two Erics), by using a Paul McKenna self-help book.  This includes an exercise that involves each of the men imagining a hero being in the room with them.   (The chosen line-up includes Sammy Davis Jr, Fidel Castro, Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi and Frank Sinatra, as well as Eric’s choice of Cantona.)  In its joyously different way, this sequence is as intensely believable as the raid; elsewhere, Loach settles into the sentimental falsity of the material with, given his reputation, surprising ease.  (I can only go on reputation:  I hadn’t realised how few of his films I’d seen in their entirety – nothing beside Kes and Loach’s segment in 11’09″01.)

In the climax to the story, Eric, his workmates and a coachload of other Manchester United supporters converge on the gangster’s security-gated country pile, where they humiliate Zac and his main acolyte.  There’s an Ealing comedy aspect to this sequence – the corps d’esprit of the genuine, ordinary people of the place giving the representatives of rebarbative authority and corrupting ambition their comeuppance – but it doesn’t, of course, look like Ealing comedy.  The massed ranks of Eric and his allies, all wearing Cantona masks (including the man himself, who materialises for the occasion), are rather alarming.  (It looks as if the two actors playing the gangsters have been expected to improvise their reactions and Steve Marsh, as Zac, really struggles to do so.  Ryan Pope as his sidekick communicates genuine fear.)    A Mr Big like Zac can hardly be regarded as an aberrant arriviste in contemporary Manchester but perhaps Loach and Laverty do see it that way.  There’s a sequence when Eric and his pals are watching a match in the pub which I didn’t fully understand but which clearly deplores the rampant commercialism of today’s Manchester United – as if the club wasn’t pretty big business in the 1990s and earlier.  (And aren’t there at least some United fans who thought Cantona was great while delivering the goods for the team but who – 12 years after his retirement – can express what they always really, xenophobically thought about him?)  A flashback to Eric and Lily’s first meeting at a dance hall in 1979 is convincing in details like the middle-aged band performing 50s hits but the tone is wetly nostalgic.

The title obviously refers to postman Eric’s both finding himself and searching for a hero and, through a combination of the two, salvaging his life  (‘Waiting for Eric’ would have been even better).  I really like, as an idea, the fantasy of a sporting great – especially one who’s retired and so, for his fans, safely preserved in the past and absolutely removed from the mess of the present – sorting out a worshipper’s unhappiness.  It’s an emotionally credible extension of the capacity of heroes in sport to do things on the field of battle that transform the lives of their supporters (and these aren’t merely temporary inspirations if they live in memory). The footage here of Cantona scoring goals – strictly rationed to leave you wanting much more – is powerful evidence of his miracle-working properties, as a footballer and a hero.  It’s a disappointment that the filmmakers evidently aren’t interested in this:  Laverty has thought of an amusing gimmick but he hasn’t written the exchanges to give any sense of how awesome these experiences must be to postman Eric – who talks easily to Cantona almost immediately.  How is Cantona?   He has a strong screen presence but I found him mainly inaudible, in English and French; as a result, his famous enigmatic quality operates at a rather too basic level.

Steve Evets is very likeable in the main role, although he’s noticeably easier in his scenes with the other posties than elsewhere: all this quintet are good and John Henshaw as Meatballs is outstanding.  When they don’t have too many clichéd lines to negotiate, Evets has some fine moments with Stephanie Bishop, who’s beautifully true as Lily.  In the opening scenes with the two stepsons (Gerard Kearns and Stefan Gumbs), he communicates Eric’s exhaustion affectingly.  Evets’ best moment with Cantona is physical comedy, when they’re out on a training run together.   The pleasingly discreet score is by George Fenton.  Oddly enough, we don’t hear ‘Pass It On’ by The Coral, the song that’s used for (and gives a lift to) the film’s trailer.

12 June 2009