The Electrical Life of Louis Wain, review: an odd, intrepid biopic that wears its art on its sleeve
12A cert, 111 min. Dir: Will Sharpe
The English artist Louis Wain led, by any reckoning, a bizarre life. This neurodivergent polymath was looking after his widowed mother and five sisters in Clerkenwell by the age of 20, and by 23 had married their governess, rather scandalously.
We would never have heard of Wain if it weren’t for his lovably anthropomorphised drawings of cats, which made him the toast of London society by the turn of the century. By 1924, mental health in severe deterioration and estate in tatters, he was committed to the pauper’s ward of a psychiatric hospital in Tooting.
Describing Wain as a Benedict Cumberbatch type gets you partway into his odd, intrepid biopic, The Electrical Life of Louis Wain – so much so that it’s hard to imagine anyone else doing it. He’s distractible, eccentric, brilliant and sad, the four humours upon which Cumberbatch has so far founded his career. With a puttied-up nose and fondness for doomed electrical patents, he’s nudging himself here towards presumably conscious self-parody.
The sensibility of this piece, though, comes more from co-writer/director Will Sharpe, a Bafta-winning actor who co-helmed two earlier low-budget films (Black Pond, The Darkest Universe) and created the depressive sitcom Flowers on Channel 4. Working from a 2014 script by Simon Stephenson, Sharpe has quite an ensemble helping out: Olivia Colman, wonderful in Flowers, lends her voice to an unnamed narrator guiding us through Wain’s whole story, while her former co-star Julian Barratt pops up as a village doctor.
Fans of Sharpe’s earlier work – I’m one – will perhaps have the easiest time cottoning on to this film’s theremin-woozy tone. At times, the busy sense of period (and wallpaper) recalls Wes Anderson, but Sharpe’s visual sense is decidedly more slovenly, less neat and tidy. There are cameos, perhaps inevitably, from Richard Ayoade and Taika Waititi, which help triangulate where this film wants to sit – in a certain comic yet melancholy nook of oddball-indie cinema.
The mussed-up style can feel uncertain, but there’s a sincerity to Sharpe’s treatment of Wain, in all his life’s shambolic aspects, that tugs away at you. Toby Jones, who plays Sir William Ingram, clubbable editor of the Illustrated London News, is such a trusty scene player you relax in his company almost on sight. As Louis’s unstable sister Caroline, Andrea Riseborough charges about at the end of her tether, a figure of flummoxed cartoon fury we never really get to know.
There’s a straightforwardly lovely Claire Foy performance as the governess, Emily Richardson, who was diagnosed with inoperable breast cancer after she and Wain married. Emily’s bright, practical manner of treating Louis more like a ward than a husband gives Foy her chance to shine: the film really loses a lot when she exits. But then, so does Louis, adrift in his private pain, with a growing army of cats as his main companions.
I’m not sure acting under mounting layers of ageing make-up is Cumberbatch’s best friend, any more than it’s any actor’s: over time, we come to feel unhelpfully distanced from the character and the performance. The intended poignancy of Wain’s decline is only there in theory.
Still, the film’s funniest touches – subtitled dialogue for cat noises – are a daft delight when it needs one. There might have been a weirder, wilder approach, with the cats themselves (“silly and alone, like us”, as Emily remarks) given more than bit parts. Imagine Terry Gilliam getting his paws on the inner life of Wain and going for broke.
One trippy, kaleidoscopic interlude heads in that direction, suggesting something between a Doctor Strange wigout and 2001: A Cat Odyssey. But the distinctive charms of Wain’s aesthetic certainly come over, especially daubed across the lovely end credits, by which time this jumpy curio, with almost palpable relief, has laid itself to rest.
In cinemas from New Year's Day
