The kidnapping of a child in a big city, on any given day, on the way to school, was in vogue in audiovisual fiction in the nineties, 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 the father’s family intended to keep her. This boom may have died out after the 1996 release of Rescuethe Mel Gibson film in which a child was kidnapped by someone who demanded a large sum of money from the family if he wanted to see the boy again safe and sound. Since then, it can be said that the archetype had remained gathering 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 Ericwhose first episode is probably one of the best that have been released and will be released this year —and perhaps that is why it is so difficult to sustain it, it is almost a work of art—, is its cast. The leading couple, played by Benedict Cumberbatch and Gaby Hoffmann, a dream of the enfant terrible indieworks like a time bomb. Both are cult actors, true legends of the history pop of the world: Hoffmann not only lived her first 11 years in the Chelsea Hotel, but was Warhol’s muse from birth. Her characters, Vincent —the guy who invented a Show similar to that of the Muppets Vincent, the successful singer who is still on the air, and Cassandra, the worn-out artist who is beginning to withdraw from the world, argue bitterly every night because they can no longer stand each other. Vincent drinks too much 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 the footsteps of his father, that sort of tormented Jim Henson — Cumberbatch is not the Jim Carrey of the series Kiddingor rather its dangerous, or unsympathetic, or sadly sunken version—Edgar has been working on a puppet, a doll, a muppetwhich he has named Eric. He is a huge, colorful, hairy monster. As self-absorbed as he is, Vincent, the father, does not even pay attention to how his son is transforming into art all that rage and helplessness 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 is part of Good Day Sunshinea program he created and in which he is increasingly viewed with worse eyes. His obsession becomes, in some way, real.
Here is one of the risks Abi Morgan takes in drawing the story: the inclusion of the monster as something to carry, as that part of yourself that you didn’t 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 it clearly and without nuances exposes how the police—this is the eighties, the city is New York—do not treat missing white children the same as black ones. It seems that this is the first time that an American series has admitted something like this. And it doesn’t just admit it, it insists on it, and it makes it a kind of backdrop, as is the lack of empathy of every last human being who appears, and who is not for a moment thinking about the horror that the family is going through, so focused is he on judging them.
But the excess of layers added to the story irremediably weighs it down. Because the story would have worked on its own. That is to say, the marriage in free fall, the alcoholism of one of them, the artist frustrated by an inexplicable unhappiness, and the disappearance of the only thing that still shone in that dying world, Edgar, were enough for the thing to work as it does in that incontestable first episode. There, what seems to be a Kramer vs. Kramer revisited, it veers, in a moment, into 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 escape to the only place where everything will always be fine: that which he is capable of creating. Her disappearance could have become the driving force of a search for meaning in the midst of meaninglessness, and it would have worked.
But what begins as almost a Noah Baumbach film —Morgan herself, like Baumbach, experienced such a traumatic divorce as a child that it keeps appearing, again and again, like an open wound, in everything she creates— with the volume of a thriller Intimate and heightened, it becomes a majestic puzzle in which everything must fit into some kind of box that apparently has nothing to do with the story, but which strives to do so: the doorman with a dark past; the mayor and his partner, the city’s waste magnate; the owner of the nightclub where the policeman investigating the case has an outstanding debt; his partner, who is dying of AIDS; Vincent’s rich and ruthless father; the vagabonds who eke out a living 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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