‘You make the world beautiful and warm and kind…’
It’s the easiest thing in the world to write a negative review. It’s also very fun. It is for this reason that I have watched and reviewed Jaws: The Revenge. It is similarly enjoyable to be effusive about something that you love. But these in-between films, the average ones, are often the hardest to analyse…
Louis Wain (Benedict Cumberbatch) is an eccentric artist who becomes famous at the end of the 19th century due to his unconventional portraits of various cats. His troubled mental state and obsession with electricity is a constant thorn in the side of his sister Caroline (Andrea Riseborough) and his wife Emily (Claire Foy). Elsewhere, there are cameos or small parts for Richard Ayoade, Taiki Waititi, Julian Barrett and Toby Jones. There is also *spoiler* a beautiful appearance by Nick Cave playing H.G. Wells and delivering a monologue about cats, as well as Olivia Colman as the narrator.
This film should be a winner for me. I’ve followed writer-director Will Sharpe since his wonderful and underrated TV series Flowers. It features a brilliant cast. There are cats everywhere. It looks genuinely enchanting. And yet, The Electrical Life of Louis Wain never sparked into life for me. This could be because it falls between two stools somewhat. It’s too dramatic to be funny but doesn’t take itself seriously enough to be truly affecting. The film’s final moments are admittedly poignant, but the character of Wain is too larger than life to really relate to. Perhaps that’s the point.
In the end, there is enough here to justify a viewing, but Sharpe’s whimsical biopic never threatens to be more than the sum of its parts. Watch Flowers instead, as that show is truly a masterpiece.