Art Can Change The World!

 But This Movie?  Not So Much.

The Electrical Life of Louis Wain (2021) – Louis Wain’s brain doesn’t work the same way as everyone else’s.  Out of that wonderful difference came amazing artwork that changed how we view cats.  Based on the real life story.

Directed by Will Sharpe

Starring Benedict Cumberbatch, Claire Foy, Andrea Riseborough

Why I Liked It – Ummm… Cumberbatch and cats?

Sigh.

Where to even begin?  It is rare to run across a movie that so clearly has no idea what to do with the story it’s trying to tell.  Which is strange because there’s an actual story to tell here.

Louis Wain was an English illustrator in the late 1800s to early 1900s.  Looking back on his story, it’s pretty clear that he would be diagnosed as neurodivergent today.  Bringing together artistic talent, high intelligence, precise focus and limited social skills, Wain was a illustrator for a London newspaper.  This was before the age of the photojournalism, so artists rendered some version of the stories.  With five sisters and a his mother all dependent on him, Wain was always looking for some way to increase his income.

Then he discovered cats.  His anthropomorphic, large eyed cats are familiar a hundred years later.  The images he created in the final decades of his life presage the psychedelic art of the 1960s decades in advance.  That artwork changed English and American attitudes towards cats as pets.  Add in a marriage to a woman his family dislikes, eventual struggles with mental health, and there’s more than enough here for a movie. 

The fact remains, “The Electrical Life of Louis Wain” feels like a series of vaguely related sketches sewn together with voice over narration.

A moment to dissection the concept of voiceover narrations.  As much as I love and root for my fellow announcers, there is almost never a movie that is improved by a voiceover narration.  It is the body putty of movie making, material slapped over the holes to smooth the final product.  For a writer, it is the personification of  telling rather than showing.  Here, it is a warning that the story is about to lurch in a new direction, one with only a slim connection to what has gone before.  I watched two hours of a biopic about Louis Wain, and feel little better informed about the man than when I started.

Both Cumberbatch and Wain seem lost here, so that may go as a moderate plus grade for the movie.  The rest of the characters are given little space to grow.  Wain’s theories about the electrical foundation for all life get little more than a passing glance. 

On the whole, it succeeds in raising my interest in Louis Wain, the artist, while wasting my time otherwise.

Rating – ** Not Impressed