The Elec­tri­cal Life of Louis Wain

The direc­tor of acclaimed TV series Flow­ers and Giri/​Haji, Will Sharpe has a pen­chant for dark sub­ject mat­ters with a comedic edge. His lat­est fea­ture, The Elec­tri­cal life of Louis Wain, fol­lows in the same vein as it traces the life of the epony­mous fig­ure (Bene­dict Cum­ber­batch), an ​‘out­sider’ artist whose main focus of study is cats. The biopic form takes on a play­ful and colour­ful eccen­tric­i­ty, mir­ror­ing the per­son­al­i­ty and kalei­do­scop­ic world­view of its protagonist.

Born in 1860, with a cleft-lip and latent schiz­o­phre­nia, Wain becomes the bread­win­ner of his fam­i­ly after the death of his father. He is sud­den­ly respon­si­ble for five unmar­ried sis­ters and an invalid moth­er. But his overzeal­ous imag­i­na­tion and fre­net­ic impuls­es to cre­ate art – rather than find employ­ment – means he can­not live up to the expec­ta­tions of his fam­i­ly, most of all his frus­trat­ed old­est sis­ter Car­o­line (Andrea Rise­bor­ough).

Wain’s sur­re­al and tech­ni­coloured vision of the world con­trasts with the black-and-white stric­tures of a rigid Vic­to­ri­an soci­ety, a vision that shows a lack of com­pas­sion towards those who trans­gress social norms. Wain and his fam­i­ly are ostracised in a world of gos­sip-lov­ing cur­tain-twitch­ers, and it is against this hos­tile back­drop that Wain’s love for cats devel­ops. He iden­ti­fies with the strays, who at that time, were not domes­ti­cat­ed pets, but regard­ed as vermin.

For­tu­nate­ly, Wain’s tal­ent for draw­ing at light­en­ing speed attracts the atten­tion of Sir William Ingram (Toby Jones), the edi­tor of Illus­trat­ed Lon­don News, who gives him a posi­tion as staff illus­tra­tor. Yet every time Wain takes a step for­ward in life, his psy­cho­log­i­cal dis­tress (his mind a tem­pes­tu­ous, ​“scream­ing hur­ri­cane”) thwarts his famil­ial and pro­fes­sion­al rela­tion­ships. When he mar­ries the pen­ni­less and cat-lov­ing gov­erness, Emi­ly Richard­son (Claire Foy), who in real life was ten years his senior, it caus­es a scan­dal amongst the locals.

At the heart of the film is a love sto­ry between Wain and Emi­ly, one that morphs into a tale of grief when Emi­ly is diag­nosed with ter­mi­nal can­cer. Cats serve as a metaphor, accen­tu­at­ing his estrange­ment from the world and recall­ing mem­o­ries of his wife and their beloved cat Peter.

But it is the film’s adop­tion of too many themes – from cats to the poten­tial of elec­tric­i­ty – that hin­ders the sto­ry. Despite the strong per­for­mances by Cum­ber­batch and Foy, the com­plex weav­ing togeth­er of sym­bol­ic strands feels con­trived; they hang loose­ly togeth­er by a pre­car­i­ous thread.

The film is enjoy­able large­ly because of the strong cast­ing and unex­pect­ed star cameos, includ­ing a famous rock god (hint: with an Aus­tralian accent) play­ing HG Wells. But the pow­er of the human sto­ry is let down by over­sen­ti­men­tal­i­ty, which the score by Arthur Sharpe doesn’t help.

Cat-lovers will like­ly find some­thing here to latch on to, but the film may not con­vince every­one that Wain was an excep­tion­al­ly sig­nif­i­cant artist, let alone that it’s an ide­al use for Sharpe’s tal­ents. It is nev­er­the­less a touch­ing human sto­ry, cel­e­brat­ing an over­looked outlier.