Courtesy Amazon Studio
Any cat fan worth their salt surely knows all about Victorian-era British artist Louis Wain and his work in normalizing felines as house pets. What they might not know, however, is that an entirely too-precious biopic has arrived from Amazon Studios, and it doesn’t feel quite so charming as much as it does forced and faux-quirky.
Benedict Cumberbatch plays the titular Wain, the only man in a family of women who, in late 1800-something, is trapped within the social constructs of the day: Men do the work, women get married—nobody’s allowed to love anyone they actually love because of, like, society, man. In his youth, Wain illustrates for some prestigious London newspaper. He also meets one Emily Richardson (here played by Claire Foy), a governess hired for his sisters for whom Wain falls hard and marries.
This was apparently unheard of at the time because Richardson was poor and 10 years Wain’s senior. Still, they did the thing and moved outside of London and spent a bunch of happy years hanging out with their cat Peter (ownership of whom we also learn was apparently weird). Sad stuff happens later, but we don’t need to spoil it.
Where writer and director Will Sharpe (Giri/Haji) succeeds in style, ambiance and tone, he falters in Electrical Life’s almost unbearable levels of cute. Cumberbatch’s turn as the eccentric Wain particularly stupefies and succeeds only in consistently reminding us we’re watching an actor act. This guy’s a champ at playing dicks—serious dicks and powerful dicks and impatient dicks—who learn to dick a little less. As Wain, he feels like someone who read about weirdos and decided his performance was going to be about fidgeting. Against Foy, who perhaps represents the only real or sincere charm in the film, Cumberbatch feels exhausting. Same goes for Andrea Riseborough as Wain’s sister Caroline, whose only role seems to be nay-saying and overly-enunciated whispering. Sharpe, it seems, wanted to illustrate a Louis-Wain-against-the-world sort of thing, but everything around him feels so utterly hopeless and lifeless (save the always brilliant Toby Jones as the newspaper magnate) that it’s very hard to care; you absolutely will be emotionally manipulated.
Pepper in melodramatic speeches about solitude and sadness delivered in stilted fashion, some baffling surface level representations of mental illness and no shortage of sap, and there you have it. Oh, but it’s not all bad. Wain’s art was truly bizarre and hysterical, and one could hardly hate a film that so prominently casts such handsome cats. Still, Electrical Life is niche and tedious and ultimately becomes another funny-lite British period piece for anglophiles and any captive people in their lives. Shoutout to Utopia’s Adeel Akhtar and his small role, though. He rules.
6
+The art and cats; pretty; Foy
-Forced quirkiness; feels long as hell
The Electrical Life of Louis Wain
Directed by Sharpe
With Cumberbatch, Foy, Riseborough and Jones
Amazon, PG-13, 118 min.
