By turns whimsical and tragic, The Electrical Life of Louis Wain tells the story of the eccentric Victorian artist whose delightful drawings of wide-eyed anthropomorphized cats transformed public perception of the feline creatures and made Wain a household name.
Directed by Will Sharpe (known for TV’s Flowers and Landscapers) and written by Sharpe and Simon Stephenson, the biopic is an affecting tribute to a celebrated artist who, despite his fame, endured much tragedy in his life. The film is strongest in its first half, in which there is a better tonal balance and a clear, tight narrative.
Olivia Colman’s lightly witty narration introduces us to Victorian London as inhabited by our colourful cast of characters, including Louis Wain (Benedict Cumberbatch), his vibrant sisters, and their governess, Emily Richardson (Claire Foy). They all live together in cheerful pandemonium in the Wain family home, where Louis struggles to provide for his five unmarried sisters and widowed mother. He manages to get by working for the Illustrated London News, mainly providing drawings of animals from country fairs—but no cats, not yet.
It is a delight to watch Cumberbatch and Foy as their characters move through the fumbling and comedic dance of courtship. Each actor imbues their respective character with an awkward yet sincere charm that complements their other half. Louis and Emily’s stumbling romance overcomes their classist society’s disapproval and gives way to a love that genuinely moves the audience. In their relationship, the film nicely navigates the balance between quirky humour and heartfelt emotion.
Tragically, the couple’s married life together is short-lived as Emily is diagnosed with cancer soon after they wed. It is during this time that they take in a stray cat and name him Peter, inspiring Wain to draw playful images of cats engaged in human antics with which to cheer Emily. At her insistence, Louis takes the illustrations to his boss, Sir William Ingram (Toby Jones), a man who befriends and champions Wain throughout his life. Ingram commissions a page of Wain’s cats for the paper’s Christmas edition, and their popularity takes society by storm. However, as Wain’s career skyrockets, his personal life crumbles: Emily’s death is a huge blow, one of his sisters struggles with mental illness, and Wain’s failure to copyright his images means his family sinks ever lower into debt. Wain buries his grief and loneliness in his cat work, unaware of his own increasingly apparent mental illness. He becomes more intent in his pursuit of electricity, for him an ethereal power connected to cats, a force of beauty, love and emotional connection which he can see as shimmers in the air.
The second half of the film is markedly more sad. While the film treats many of these sequences in a way that genuinely brings viewers to tears, the film also struggles with tonal balance and wallows in its own sadness and sentimentality too much of the time. The film capitalizes on its tragic aspects and our emotional response by replaying certain despairing moments over and over again as flashbacks throughout the second half of the film. This tactic undermines the film’s more meaningful sequences and Cumberbatch’s truly wrenching performance.
Tonally, the film also flounders with how to portray Wain’s mental illness as it worsens in the second half of the story, often jumping between quirky comedy and heart-wrenching agony in a jarring manner. The scene in which Wain experiences a recurring delusion on his return trip to England from America particularly comes to mind.
Electrical Life also uses highly stylized visuals and tactics to convey Wain’s perspective as his mental state fluctuates. Amusing subtitles on cats, animated cat heads in place of human heads, Dutch angles, and psychedelic swirls all depict the feverish activity inside Wain’s head, contrasted with the calm he finds when remembering Emily.
Although Electrical Life has its tonal flaws and sometimes struggles narratively to navigate Louis Wain’s mental illness, overall it’s a heartfelt and eccentric biopic that pays tribute to the artist and brings much-needed whimsy to the genre. Brilliant performances from the cast and a poignant score form Arthur Sharpe make the film crackle with Wain’s sought-after electricity.
The Electrical Life of Louis Wain is available to watch on Amazon Prime.
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