A respectable screen biography, The Electrical Life of Louis Wain also smothers its good intentions with a lot of misplaced pomp and frills. Everything about co-writer/director Will Sharpe’s film suggests that the intention is to connect the audience to the story by way of its stylized choices, which is surely entirely possible, as many directors have proven over the course of cinematic history. One inherently – indeed, almost instinctively – knows when those choices are the wrong ones, and something always feels off about the telling of this story, which is ostensibly about a notable and controversial artist’s very gradual detachment from any kind of reality.
Instead of offering much beyond a biographical accounting of that story, Sharpe’s treatment of material seems to mirror that detachment from reality. In this version of the tale, the eponymous artist, whose unique and almost ostentatiously colorful paintings of cats reinvented the feline in the public eye, the method of detachment is to distract, distract and distract some more. We get cheeky narration from Olivia Colman, even when the situation onscreen seems to be at odds with its tone. We get a boxy frame from Sharpe and cinematographer Erik Wilson that paradoxically compresses the images onscreen in a movie that would clearly rather free them from their confines.
Most obviously, we get a mannered and bothersome performance from the usually reliable Benedict Cumberbatch as Louis Wain himself, as well as a handful of other, similarly mannered performances from actors who should similarly know better. The biographical details are all here, from how Louis took over as the breadwinner for his family after the death of his father, to how much of his adulthood was spent living with his cantankerous sister Caroline (Andrea Riseborough), to how he fell head over heels in love with Emily (Claire Foy), a governess hired by Caroline to teach her children when traditional schooling practices wouldn’t suffice. The film supposes that, following Emily’s diagnosis of breast cancer and a prognosis that the disease was terminal, Louis slowly disintegrated into a shell of himself.
This supposition of the real Wain’s deteriorating mental health has been challenged by historians in the past, but that isn’t necessarily a problem. Sharpe and co-screenwriter Simon Stephenson have not made a documentary with this exceptionally whimsical dramatization of the story, and their intentions are quite clearly not to be straightforward in their narrative presentation. Still, by assuming a lot about the most troubled patch of Wain’s life and by telling the man’s story with so many flourishes, it borders the line between acceptably revisionist and simply evasive of, as they call it, the damned truth.
On a structural level, the film suffers from a dramatic stasis, depicting professional accomplishments and heavy emotional blows and, in other words, the dramatic rise and fall of Louis Wain with a sympathetic but dull hand. The actors fail to enliven the material, with the exception being Foy’s note-perfect comic timing, which almost elevates the character from otherwise being a tool of the plot. Sharpe’s fanciful style also tries to distract us from how ordinary the storytelling is, but the major emotional payoff of The Electrical Life of Louis Wain proves frustratingly elusive. This is a brightly colored but tortured attempt to find significance in a man’s story, without the conviction to offer us any genuine insight.
Photo courtesy of Amazon Studios
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