The Electrical Life of Louis Wain
Will Sharpe (2021)
Despite the current queue of higher-profile films to see, I felt I had to catch The Electrical Life of Louis Wain: over the years, I’ve sent and received a fair few greetings cards featuring the title character’s mad-eyed, anthropomorphised cats. Louis Wain (1860-1939) was, from a young age, an oddball. In later life, he suffered serious mental illness and spent his last fifteen years in hospitals. Will Sharpe’s biopic is nothing if not whimsical, as if to suggest it’s on the same wavelength as its curious subject. The longer the film goes on, though, the more tonally wrong it feels. Sharpe does little to explore Wain’s psychological condition, which may have been schizophrenia, although ‘the diagnosis is in dispute’ (Wikipedia); whatever it was, there seems little doubt that an accumulation of deaths of people close to him triggered Wain’s succession of nervous breakdowns. Although Sharpe doesn’t omit these deaths, he spends too much time treating (Benedict Cumberbatch) as an engaging eccentric, dropping in dollops of mawkishness along the way. The result verges on tasteless.
Sharpe, who wrote the screenplay with Simon Stephenson, takes his strange title from Louis Wain’s persisting belief in electricity as ‘A mysterious and elemental force that occasionally he could feel shimmering in the ether and that explained all of life’s most profound and alarming secrets’. Those are the words of the film’s narrator, voiced, unmistakably, by Olivia Colman but with no other identity; she isn’t, for example, someone claiming to have known Wain or who is telling his story to a particular listener or kind of listener. The narration has occasional moments of brutal candour – there’s a reference to Victorian England’s ‘bizarre social prejudices and the fact that everything stank of shit’ – but Colman’s voice is, for the most part, jolly and amused. This is surprising, in view of what befalls Wain, yet it chimes with Sharpe’s visual and musical choices. Philip Kemp’s Sight & Sound (Winter 2021-22) review, presumably quoting Sharpe, notes that the film was shot in 4:3 ratio ‘for its “storybook, fairy-tale quality”’. The art that Wain continued to produce during his last years, although still cat-centric, was ‘marked by bright colours, flowers, and intricate and abstract patterns’ (Wikipedia again). You might need to know that in advance to make sense of the kaleidoscopic effects and the often prettified look that Sharpe and his cinematographer, Erik Wilson, contrive. The score, by Arthur Sharpe (the director’s brother), is of a piece with the queasy quaintness.
For purposes of historical accuracy, Benedict Cumberbatch is given a cleft lip and beaky nose. The lip is understandable – you accept it as contributing to the younger Louis’s self-conscious shyness – but why the nose? The real Louis Wain wasn’t Cyrano de Bergerac and it’s not as if his face is famous enough for many viewers to know how closely or otherwise the actor playing him resembles the original. Although the results are patchy, Cumberbatch makes a valiant attempt to blend quirkiness with emotional depth, and he has some strong support. Claire Foy is Emily Richardson, Wain’s sisters’ governess and subsequently his wife. Their time together was tragically short: Emily developed breast cancer and died three years after they married. You don’t get any sense of the true age difference between Louis and Emily, who was ten years his senior (which placed the couple on the receiving end of one of the era’s ‘bizarre social prejudices’). Foy is convincing, even so; there’s relatively little strain in the balance of serious and humorous in her performance. At first, Andrea Riseborough seems to be overdoing humourless, scolding Caroline, the eldest of Wain’s four younger sisters; it’s a narrow role but Riseborough’s unrelieved neurotic intensity somehow validates it. No surprise that there’s good work from Toby Jones as Sir William Ingram, editor of the Illustrated London News (which kept Wain going as an artist of subjects other than cats in the early stages of his career) or, in a smaller role, from Adheel Akhtar. Phoebe Nicholls has a melancholy grace as Louis’s mother but there’s also some ropy acting – from Asif Chaudhry, Sharon Rooney and Nick (Bad Seeds) Cave, an inexplicable choice to play H G Wells.
Wells was both an admirer and a supporter of Louis Wain. Sharpe includes a bit from a radio broadcast in which Wells praises Wain’s creation of a ‘whole cat world’; Wells also helps draw attention to the artist’s plight when his desperate sisters have him committed to a pauper ward at a mental hospital in Tooting. The resulting public appeal led to an intervention by the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, and Wain was transferred to the Bethlem Royal Hospital, and latterly to the more agreeable surroundings of Napsbury Hospital in Hertfordshire. According to Wells, the popularity of Louis Wain’s feline art transformed the domestic status of cats in Britain from creatures tolerated because of their practical usefulness as mousers, to pets in their own right. Will Sharpe commendably uses real rather than CGI cats throughout but it’s disappointing that – except for Peter, the stray kitten who set the cat pictures ball rolling after Louis and Emily adopted him – they function in the film largely as décor.
19 January 2022