‘Eric’: Benedict Cumberbatch’s monstrous fatherhood

The kidnapping of a child in a big city, on any given day, on the way to school, was popular in audiovisual fiction in the 1990s, probably due to the success of the adaptation of Not without my daughterhe best seller by Betty Mahmoody and William Hoffer in which the author herself recounted her experience trying to return to the United States with her daughter from Tehran, where her father’s family intended to keep her. This boom may have died out after the release in 1996 of Rescue, the Mel Gibson film in which a boy was kidnapped by someone who demanded a large sum of money from the family if he wanted to see the boy safe and sound again. Since then, it can be said that the archetype had been collecting dust in the back room of the collective imagination until Abi Morgan, the creator of The Split —the series about a dysfunctional family of divorce lawyers, broadcast by Filmin—, has painfully and peculiarly resurrected it in the miniseries, or the drama with a bohemian marriage in ruins, Eric, from Netflix.

The main asset of Eric, whose first episode is probably one of the best that has been released and will be released this year – and perhaps that is why it is so difficult to sustain, it is almost a work of goldsmithing – is its cast. The main couple, played by Benedict Cumberbatch and Gaby Hoffmann, a dream of the enfant terrible indie, works like a time bomb. Both are cult actors, authentic legends of history pop of the world: Hoffmann not only lived his first 11 years in the Chelsea Hotel, but was Warhol’s muse from birth. Her character, Vincent—the guy who invented a Show similar to that of the Muppets of success still on the air—and Cassandra—the consumed artist who is beginning to distance herself from the world—argue bitterly every night because they have stopped supporting each other. Vincent drinks more than necessary, and is always angry. That’s why there is something of him in the monster that little Edgar (Ivan Morris Howe) has created.

Following in his father’s footsteps, that kind of tormented Jim Henson – Cumberbatch is not the Jim Carrey of the series Kiddingrather its dangerous, or unempathetic, or sadly sunken version—Edgar has been working on a puppet, a doll, a muppet, which he called Eric. He is a huge, colorful, hairy monster. As focused on himself as he is, Vincent, the father, doesn’t even pay attention to how his son is transforming all that anger and helplessness into art for not being able to change what is happening between his parents. When one day, on the way to school, just two blocks away but where he never went alone, Edgar disappears, Vincent becomes obsessed, believing that he will return when the muppet of the child to be part of Good Day Sunshine, a program he created and in which he is increasingly seen in a worse light. His obsession becomes, in some ways, real.

Here is one of the risks that Abi Morgan takes in the drawing of the story: the inclusion of the monster as something to carry, like that part of yourself that you did not want to see and that, suddenly, is the only thing you can see . When that happens, the detour is interesting, because the kidnapping of the boy is the trigger, but it is not the only thing that happens. In fact, everything in Eric it happens at the same time, and sometimes it does so for the better. Like when he clearly and without nuance exposes how the police—this is the eighties, the city is New York—does not treat missing white kids the same as they do black kids. It would seem that it is the first time that an American series admits something like this. And not only does he admit it, but he insists on it, and turns it into a kind of backdrop, as is the lack of empathy of every last human being who appears, and who is not even thinking about the horror for a moment. that the family goes through, as focused as he is on judging them.

But the excess of layers added to the story weighs it down irremediably. Because the story would have worked alone. That is to say, the marriage in free fall, the alcoholism of one of them, the frustrated artist faced with inexplicable unhappiness, and the disappearance of the only thing that still shone in that disappearing world, Edgar, were enough for the thing to work as it had. does in that incontestable first episode. There, what looks like a Kramer vs. Kramer revisited, it veers, in a moment, to the fantastic, delirious, justified, and with symbolic weight. Edgar still greatly admires his father and feels understood only by his mother. Each argument is a blow that only fuels his imagination, his need to flee to the only place where everything will always be okay: that which he is capable of creating. His disappearance could have become the driving force of a search for meaning in the midst of meaninglessness, and things would have worked.

But what begins as almost a Noah Baumbach film—Morgan herself, like Baumbach, lived through a divorce as a child so traumatic that it keeps appearing, over and over again, like an open wound, in everything she creates—with the volume of a thriller increased intimacy, it becomes a majestic puzzle in which everything must fit into some type of box that apparently has nothing to do with the story, but strives to make it so: the goalkeeper with a dark past; the mayor and his partner, the city’s waste magnate; the owner of the nightclub where the police officer investigating the case has an outstanding debt; his partner, who is dying of AIDS; Vincent’s rich and ruthless father; the homeless who live poorly in the tunnels; the student who is more than a friend to Cassandra, the mother… The workmanship is, however, so impeccable that, although the exercise is thick and twisted, it is enjoyable.

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