‘The Electrical Life of Louis Wain’ Review: Cumberbatch Fails to Electrify as Overly-Quirky Artistic Genius

For a movie starring Benedict Cumberbatch and an array of perfectly-groomed, fluffy kittens, “The Electrical Life of Louis Wain” is an unexpectedly tiresome ride. Directed by Will Sharpe, the film is a dramatic biopic of 19th century English artist Louis Wain, famed for his colorful, anthropomorphized drawings of cats. Wain, who was later diagnosed with schizophrenia, was a complex man in real life, but is reduced in Sharpe’s highly-stylized film into a quirky cartoon character that only teases at being a real man.

Olivia Colman narrates the film in a persistently Mary Poppins-esque voice that clashes with the movie’s overall tragic tone. The story stretches from Wain’s relationship with his cancer-ridden wife Emily Richardson (Claire Foy) to his chronic financial turmoil as he struggles to take care of his mother and six sisters. Throughout, the film revels in its own quirkiness. Full of fanciful costumes, risqué encounters in the bedroom, and a governess who teaches her female wards sword-fighting, “The Electrical Life of Louis Wain” progresses like a whimsical Dickens novel. The movie isn’t at all historically accurate, nor does it try to be –– a choice that leaves it teetering between mimicking a children’s bedtime story and actualizing the painful reality of Wain’s life.

Fans of Cumberbatch won’t be surprised to find him reprising the role of the eccentric, socially-awkward genius, which he plays in “The Imitation Game” (2014) as Alan Turing and in the BBC series “Sherlock” (2010-2017) as the eponymous detective. This time, though, the actor fails to revitalize his character in any fresh, exciting way –– Cumberbatch’s Louis Wain, who can whip up a sketch in less than a minute, stands painfully straight at all times and stutters when he speaks, leaving him feeling more like one of the cartoon characters he draws for the newspaper than a real-life man and artist.

Speaking of art, “The Electrical Life of Louis Wain” is puzzlingly devoid of Wain’s artistic pursuits and achievements. Sharpe sporadically includes scenes of Wain painting or transporting wagons full of cats –– his models –– but these rare bits of artistry are thrown together with confusing monologues of Wain preaching about the wonders of electricity. In trying to capture the many facets of Louis Wain –– artist, inventor, and family man –– Sharpe fails to lend depth to any of them, leaving the audience with a half-baked idea of who the real Louis Wain truly was.

Still, Sharpe’s creative approach is not without merit and results in a deliberately-crafted, visually-rewarding film. Special effects almost imperceptibly render landscape shots into paintings that match Wain’s own fantastical style. In a particularly hallucinogenic sequence, the audience enters Wain’s mind via a digitally-produced montage of wide-eyed, cartoonish “Louis Wain” cats. It seems that the real artist in the movie is not Louis Wain, who never truly evolves from the idiosyncratic man first seen handing out sketches for free, but Sharpe himself. The director aspires to capture Wain’s spirit by mimicking his eccentric style –– a technique that may work for the cats Wain draws, but leads to a flat protagonist when applied to a human being.