​Eric and Blitz: What These Two Tales of Missing Boys Have To Do With My Waning Tolerance For Woke Filmmaking

April 2025

 

We always look... don’t we...

 

At that car accident we pass by on the freeway...

 

Why?

 

Is it the same reason that draws mothers like me to films about missing children...

Even though it is our worst nightmare...

 

I’m not sure I know why...

But I have trouble resisting this genre...

 

So when Blitz showed up on AppleTV...

And Eric on Netflix...

I bit...

 

But just because I begin a film, does not always mean I finish it...

 

So I bailed on the Blitz...but not Eric...

Which are both centered around the disappearance of a child...

 

Why did I stay with one and not the other...

Even though both films check all the woke boxes so popular in Hollywood these days...

For which my tolerance is rapidly waning...

 

The Blitz’s problem was Saoirse Ronan was just not enough of a draw...

To keep me engaged once I realized where this film was going...

Which was to hit me over the head repeatedly with how horrible racism and sexism were in war-torn Britain...

 

Now I should have known better...

Because the director... Steve McQueen of Twelve Years a Slave fame..

Aims not so much to entertain as to lecture...

 

And the disappearance of a child sent into the countryside during the Blitz..

Seemed a bit too contrived...

 

But why did I hang on until the end with Eric?

 

Which makes a very concerted effort to tap into as many social justice issues....

As can be shoved into a single Netflix series...

 

And so could have been just as tedious...

 

Because we not only have racism in Eric...

Where, of course, all the bad guys are white and all the blacks good..

But there is also homophobia, police corruption, ruthless developers, closeted politicians on the take...

With some pedophilia and sex trafficking thrown in for good measure...

 

And lots of homeless...

 

All set in 1980s New York...

Which looks as awful as I remember it...

 

Well, in part, I was drawn in because this series looked like it was going to be a fictional retelling of the true story that haunts every mother’s nightmares...

Because we have long lived in fear that it could happen to our child...

 

The disappearance of Etan Patz...

 

An event that struck terror in all our hearts when it happened in 1979...

When a 6-year-old who was allowed to walk to school alone for the first time...

 

Disappeared.... and was never seen again...

 

Which played no small role in the advent of now decades of helicopter parenting...

 

And Etan’s story ranks up there with that of Kitty Genovese..

As an emblem of the rot in urban society...

For which pre-Giuliani New York was the poster child ...

 

But Eric is not a retelling of the story of Etan Patz...

Although it begins with the disappearance of a child on his way to school

 

And even though it wallows in all the hot-button issues so popular with Hollywood these days....

Eric has something the Blitz does not...

 

Benedict Cumberbatch...

 

And a far better screenwriter...

 

Now Cumberbatch has perfected playing the dissolute drug and alcohol addled misanthrope...

In possession of a rapier-like wit...

 

 And if you want to see his tour de force performance of this well-known British film archetype....

Check out Patrick Melrose ...

 

And the screenwriter Abbi Morgan has given Cumberbatch some great lines...

 

My favorite of which is ...

 

When he is sitting in the middle of an expensive restaurant with the suits he works for...

He compares the mouth of one of them...

To an orifice far south of the oral cavity...

And once he says it... that is all you see every time you see that poor fellow .....

 

Cumberbatch can really chew the scenery in these types of roles...

And he does so in Eric...

 

Plus, his portrayal of the dad, Vincent, who designs puppets for a children’s television show...

Allowed Abi Morgan to use magical realism...

And the monster puppet Eric...

To be the physical presence of the voices Vincent is hearing in his head...

 

And Eric the Puppet is a frightening presence...

Who was actually created by Vincent’s missing son Edgar...

 

Now that was interesting...

 

So even though Eric wants to be a billboard for a litany of social justice ills..

Which you can get anywhere these days...

I watched until the end...

 

Because it was clever... and not what one would expect from this genre...

 

So I have a message for Steve McQueen...

 

If you want me to finish your movie...

 

You need to do more than just give me a lecture...

 

Because I’ve had quite enough of those already...

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