From Sherlock Holmes to Alan Turing to Doctor Strange, Benedict Cumberbatch has played several eccentric geniuses throughout his career. However, Louis Wain might be his most eccentric role yet. This Victorian gentleman was a failure in most of his polymath pursuits -- opera, boxing, invention, science -- but had a gift for illustration, a skill which made him famous and allowed him to become England's foremost advocate for the value of cats as pets.
Despite his celebrity, a combination of bad financial planning, serious mental illness, and personal loss left Wain destitute. This true-life tragedy becomes the basis for Will Sharpe's winning biopic The Electrical Life of Louis Wain. Before The Electrical Life of Lous Wain focuses on the rise-and-fall of the polymath, the film spends time showing Wain's pre-fame family life with his six sisters and a romance with their governess, Emily Richardson (Claire Foy). Narrated by Olivia Colman, there's a feminist undercurrent to the framing -- implying that had patriarchy not forced Louis to be the head of household, and had the women in his life been more empowered, the Wain family might not have struggled so much. Wain and Richardson's love story also comes up against the classism of the time.
Cumberbatch and Foy have great chemistry -- or as Louis Wain might be more likely to put it, "powerful electricity." Though Richardson isn't as severely impaired as Wain eventually becomes, she is clearly neuroatypical, managing her anxieties by hiding in dark spaces, holding onto rocks from her hometown, and rereading Shakespeare. Their marriage is frowned upon in society and comes to a tragic end. Yet, in the time they're together, they help each other and make the world more beautiful for both of them.
Towards the end of Richardson's life, the couple adopts a stray cat, whom they name Peter. In 1880s England, keeping a cat as a pet was seen as a sign of insanity and possibly witchcraft. Connecting with the creatures as fellow outcasts, Louis Wain was, in his wife's words, the first to show cats' "absurdity" and "humanity" in his paintings and cartoons. This newfound artistic obsession is only just starting to bloom when his wife passes, and it becomes the one thing keeping him going emotionally after his loss. Keeping him going financially is a different story: he forgot to copyright his art and thus utterly failed to monetize the popularity of his cats.
The love story is the most emotionally compelling part of The Electrical Life of Louis Wain. As the film extends beyond that to cover Louis Wain's full life story, it runs into typical biopic narrative issues where it's difficult to connect disparate life events into a single narrative. What can't be described as "typical," by any means, is the movie's visual style. The directing reflects its protagonist's mental state -- heightened colors and film grain effects pop in and out to reflect Wain's agony and ecstasy -- getting more intense as his schizophrenia worsens.
Though historians can't be sure when Wain made which paintings, due to his poor record-keeping, the movie theorizes that his declining mental state can be tracked through increasing abstraction in his artwork. Wain believed cats were connected to electricity, and that they would eventually evolve to become blue and walk on two legs (basically predicting James Cameron's Avatar). One scene gets so abstract it recalls the "Beyond the Infinite" sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey -- if the stargate at Jupiter were made of electric cats.
The Electrical Life of Louis Wain remains a delightfully funny film even when its story gets darker. There are moments of uplift amidst the tragedy, as well as one twist that will make British audiences grateful to have the NHS and Americans sighing in recognition. The movie draws comparisons with Tim Burton's outsider artist biopics Ed Wood and Big Eyes. Fans of Burton and other such mainstream-yet-offbeat auteurs like Wes Anderson will find a lot to love about The Electrical Life of Louis Wain, as will anyone who ever enjoyed a good cat video.
The Electrical Life of Louis Wain opens in theaters on Oct. 22 and streams on Amazon Prime Video on Nov. 5.