The film comes on little cat feet
Even with Benedict Cumberbatch as kittykitsch artist, biopic is no meow-sterpiece.
If you thought the memeification of cats was a product of the internet, perhaps you’re unaware of Louis Wain. The Victorian-era polymath artist became famous for his illustrations of anthropomorphized felines in bow ties and bonnets, having tea parties and playing tennis. Later, a bit like the Beatles around the time of “Revolver,” Wain’s kitty-kitsch art turned psychedelic, which became evidence for a posthumous diagnosis of schizophrenia — one still under dispute.
Will Sharpe’s “The Electrical Life of Louis Wain,” cowritten by Simon Stephenson, does not attempt to settle that debate, but it does lean into its phantasmagorical potential so that Wain’s turbulent inner life can be exteriorized as an explosion in the period-quirk factory. Tottering unsteadily between mining Wain’s vast repertoire of eccentricities for comedy and slathering them in pathos, the movie winds up so busily whimsical it forgets to actually be about anything.
If you didn’t know who Louis Wain was before seeing this film, you’ll be only fractionally more illuminated, and possibly a good deal more irritated, after.
The movie’s version of Wain, the latest in a string of tormented geniuses played by Benedict Cumberbatch — perhaps the foremost actor to capitalize on the tendency to conflate being extremely clever with being very thin and British — comes across as a tic-laden naif who, as he confesses late on, finds living in this world simply more difficult than it is for everyone else. Forever wearing the expression of a man who just snapped out of a stage magician’s trance, he runs erratically, swims ridiculously, boxes comically and speaks through a harelip-covering mustache with all the twitchy, blinky oddness of a bird that’s suddenly found itself in a human body. He does, however, have supporters, like William Ingram (a warmly impish Toby Jones), the editor of a London gazette, who overlooks Wain’s unconventionality to focus on his speedy, ambidextrous drawing style.
The illustrations Wain churns out for the newspaper — in between composing operas, bloodying his nose in the boxing ring and indulging his semi-mystical interest in the new science of electricity — just about keep Wain, his mother and five sisters solvent, though in circumstances far reduced from their gentility before the death of Wain’s father.
Louis is ill-equipped to take up the head-of-household position, and his mother is vague and ineffectual, so his sister Caroline (Andrea Riseborough) has stepped into the breach, and a right one-note nagging harridan it has made of her.
Things briefly perk up when Caroline hires Emily (Claire Foy) as the younger girls’ governess, but if Emily and Louis’ kooky romance and marriage bring Wain his happiest years, the difference in class status and age between them visits only more social disrepute on the Wain family. And then, in a tragedy foreshadowed by Erik Wilson’s swaying, sentimental camerawork in which golden lens flares have the tendency to mist over the image like unfallen tears, the kooky crumbles when Emily is diagnosed with terminal cancer.
This happens the same day the couple find a kitten in their garden, which — very much against the convention of the day — they adopt as a pet. Peter, as the little black-and-white moggie is named, starts to figure in Wain’s drawings, and at Ingram’s encouragement, cats are soon more or less all he draws. These cat pictures, which the unworldly Wain neglects to copyright, bring him transatlantic fame (at one point, he visits New York to take up a position for the Hearst Corp.). But are they the delightful manifestations of a wistful creative imagination or the nightmarish harbingers of encroaching mental illness?
It’s a question “The Electrical Life of Louis Wain” is not much interested in exploring. Not that the film has any claws at all, but particularly when it comes to Wain’s psychological state, it bats around the issue with the softest of paws.
Instead, as misdirection, Sharpe embellishes the story with a cabinet of filmmaking tchotchkes, only some of which work. (His better observed forays into darkly comic descriptions of mental instability include “Black Pond” and the TV series “Flowers.”)
One smart touch: the narration, delivered by Olivia Colman with a bedtimestory voice so wry and delightful it sometimes manages to trick you into thinking that what she’s saying is not just a load of hooey.
More often, the flourishes serve merely to distract: drive-by cameos from Taika Waititi, Richard Ayoade and Nick Cave; occasional use of olde worlde pinhole-camera imagery to describe Wain’s night terrors; a couple of times late on when a landscape goes mushy and oversaturated, blurring into a synthetic re-creation of a painting. Not to mention the bizarre decision to subtitle just one scene of cat dialogue in such cutesy LOLcatspeak (“I are cat” says one, “I like jomping” says another) that you half expect one of them to wonder whether they can has cheezburger.
All this whimsy is applied with so little rigor and so little actual insight that it quickly becomes tedious, making the film’s run time feel exponentially longer than it is, without — and this is a crucial flaw for ailurophiles looking for a good time — actually giving us nearly enough cat. Of all the film’s many disappointments, this is surely the most egregious. It’s almost enough to make one accuse Sharpe of being — horrors! — a dog person.