Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Electrical Life of Louis Wain’ on Amazon Prime, a Loose and Lively Benedict Cumberbatch Biopic, Heavy on the Whimsy

Amazon Prime’s The Electrical Life of Louis Wain may test your tolerance for extreme whimsy (classical British style, not Wes Anderson indie-American style). Benedict Cumberbatch headlines this biopic playing the British artist famous for his drawings and paintings of anthropomorphic and/or psychedelic cats, which some say reflect his mental illness; you’ll likely recognize his work more than his name. So yes, this is a BOATS movie (Based On A True Story), and a British period piece, and a Cumberbatch vehicle, but it tries hard not to be too conventionally all of these things. Let’s see if it succeeds.

THE ELECTRICAL LIFE OF LOUIS WAIN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: The movie begins audaciously, with Cumberbatch in old-person makeup, which is something usually reserved for the ends of movies (or at least ones that aren’t about Benjamin Button). The makeup is pretty convincing, which can’t be said for too many instances of such. Anyway, the audaciousness continues, with a shift to a time in Louis Wain’s life when Cumberbatch doesn’t have to wear fake age spots and white hair, Victorian England, a setting that Olivia Colman describes, via voiceover, as always smelling like dook. Everyone’s obsessed with electricity, she says, especially this Louis fellow, who is not at all like most folk, and we’re going to get deeply into why exactly that is so.

See, Louis has five younger sisters and a mother and he’s trying to provide for all of them, and maintain their status among members of the non-working class. One may be tempted to believe that his family has driven him mad, but one soon realizes there’s much more to it than that. Louis is an inventor seeking patents and a teacher (I think?) and a terrible boxer and a highly talented illustrator, reflective of his scattered brain. His hair is a fright; a scraggle of mustache covers his cleft lip. One side of his face is smeared with mud from getting too close to a bull he wanted to sketch and the other is smeared with blood from pugilist battery, and he walks into a job interview. Newspaperman Sir William Ingram (Toby Jones) very much wants to hire Louis as an artist for The Illustrated London News for a typically doghsit newspaper salary (please note how little the times have changed), as long as he can tame his “imbecilic behavior.” Louis continues said imbecilic behavior by turning him down, but don’t worry, he’ll come around to the idea of doing terrific work for terribly small amounts of money.

Louis heads home to a house of chaos lorded over by his eldest sister Caroline (Andrea Riseborough), who conducts herself like someone who is incapable of experiencing joy. And guess what, ANOTHER woman has joined the household, Emily Richardson (Claire Foy), as a governess for the younger girls. She’s no Poppins, and she shan’t even try to be, because if ever there was an untamed household outside of Gerwig’s Little Women that is utterly Poppins-proof, it is this one. After eyes over the dinner table and a pregnant pause in the gentleman’s room of the theatre after she follows him in there, Louis and Emily fall in love. And hey big surprise, Caroline subsequently fires her.

But it’s too late. Louis and Emily marry and move to a quiet country home and egad, it’s such a scandal that he has paired himself with someone as socially low as a teacher. Six months go by and he’s been drawing for the Times and they’ve been having tender-moment picnics and then she’s diagnosed with terminal cancer. They’re standing in a melancholy rain when they hear a mew-mew from the grass, and it’s a kitten they name Peter, who is such an extraordinary cat, he walks on a leash, brightens their lives, inspires Louis to draw cats and acts as a great comfort to the man after the inevitable happens to Emily. Louis’ life goes on, back to his sisters, to fame — for his charming and eccentric cat illustrations of course — and not much fortune, to a slowly deteriorating mind. And through it all, he “feels” electricity, always and everywhere.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The Electrical Life kinda smooshes together artist biopics like Big Eyes, Basquiat or Frida with biopics about mentally ill subjects like A Beautiful Mind or The Soloist, Cumberbios like The Imitation Game and The Courier and Victorian-era electricity biodramas starring Benedict Cumberbatch like The Current War.

Performance Worth Watching: There isn’t much elbow room for actors in this busy, style-drenched film, and that even includes Cumberbatch. But credit Foy for being an amiable, calming presence whose earnestness cuts through a lot of the tumult.

Memorable Dialogue: “Jomping. I like jomping.” — one of Louis’ kittens expresses a limited grasp of the English language via subtitles

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: As it turns out, all the electricity Louis was feeling was… love. That’s not a joke. That’s me paraphrasing a line from The Electrical Life of Louis Wain, a movie that one learns to appreciate despite its faults, like a good-hearted cousin who moves in and leaves their socks laying around and picks their nose and frequently microwaves smelly food. Will Sharpe directs with creative abandon, cycling through a dozen styles, ranging from staid bio to megaquirked comedy to psychedelic freakout, with lovely painterly transitions, shots of adorable cats in cluttered and quaint whimsically British settings, scads of old-person makeup and other visual and tonal indulgences. It’s the type of movie with the cojones to include a phrase like “nigglingly peculiar foibles” in the script, but strangely doesn’t quite inspire fits of annoyed rage.

All this is what Sharpe deems necessary to capture the character of Louis Wain, a tremendously creative man, but one with no sense, business or common. This version of his story puts the mental in sentimental, using his illness — retroactively diagnosed as possibly schizophrenia or autism — as a key component in the melancholy arc of Wain’s life. The film wants us to appreciate his genius, asserting that his work not only popularized the idea of adopting cats as house pets, but also spread immeasurable joy. We can buy that. Less so, its insistence that great art is the product of great suffering, a wrongheaded and regressive claim that clashes with the greater context here — our greater appreciation for Louis Wain in the light of modern views on mental illness. We as a society have foregone stigma for empathy, simplicity for complexity, reactionary emotions for reason, all stuff this movie sometimes disregards for the sake of a tidy thematic throughline amidst much visual pandemonium.

But it’s also important to see its good heart and intentions. Wilde renders the life of this man as a thing of wild, unconventional beauty; whimsy is the movie’s primary currency, and its accounts are flush. It covers the years between 1881 and 1925, which is a lot, too much for many biopics, but it doesn’t seem out of sorts for this particular story, considering its hectic nature. I found it slightly cloying and slightly charming and slightly too busy and slightly overbearing and slightly annoying, but frequently enjoyable, emotionally substantive and generally engaging. I admired its energy and effort, its light touch for heavy subject matter, its commitment to capturing this man’s spirit, which sure seemed feral — like, I dunno, a stray cat maybe? — in the notoriously buttoned-up Victorian age.

Our Call: STREAM IT. The Electrical Life of Louis Wain is the most mixed of mixed bags, and your mileage may vary. But I found its loose and lively jazzlike stylings slightly more invigorating than aggravating.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream The Electrical Life of Louis Wain on Amazon Prime