Shorted

There's a certain strain of acting role that you can identify with particular performers who've seemingly made said roles part of their public image, intentionally or not. Despite what range they may have (sometimes considerable), it's not out of the realm of reason to suggest that some things are "a Nick Cage role" or a "Jon Hamm role." When a film's main character is "eccentric English artist who has difficulty functioning in society and interacting with other people", I don't think it's too far a stretch to suggest that that's a "Benedict Cumberbatch role", based primarily on his most notable performance as Sherlock Holmes for the BBC's Sherlock. So when I saw the trailer for The Electrical Life of Louis Wain and saw who was starring in it, it immediately looked like a "Benedict Cumberbatch role" to me and, in that one small respect, it didn't disappoint. In most other respects, there wasn't a lot to be said for it.

Wain was an English artist whom I confess to have never heard of prior to seeing the film. Said film is a depiction of his life as an often-struggling artist in Victorian England, his rise to fame with his stylized pictures of cats and kittens, and his difficulties in dealing with the commercial and economic side of making a living at what was the foremost of his many, many hobbies. Seems like a decent story to be told, yes? And for the first third of the film, it's clearly set up to tell that story. Wain's personal foibles are examined, his devoted but brief relationship with his wife is explored, and his relationships, professional and familial, are all on display. Act I of Storytelling 101 is fairly fleshed out. The problem occurs when we try to move on to Acts II and III. Most stories have some kind of conflict to be resolved. Wain's story has conflict, in that he doesn't socialize well and is awful at managing money in a situation where, as the male of the household, he's expected to care for his sisters and indolent mother. But that conflict never changes and no resolution ever occurs. We're introduced to that situation in the first 10 minutes of the film. Thirty minutes later, it hasn't changed. Sixty minutes later, it hasn't changed. In fact, other than Wain's direct living conditions and slowly deteriorating mental state, basically nothing changes as the film moves along. He's still drawing cats. His family is still hard-up for money. His eldest sister continually reproaches him for not having that money. The overall situation is as static as it was at the beginning of the film. It's like watching a Wikipedia article come to life: "This is what Louis Wain's life was like, from beginning to end." Even the first other character we see besides Louis, Dan Rider (Adeel Akhtar), reappears at the film's conclusion to talk about how he still enjoys Wain's artwork. Overall, nothing much happens in the story and it's mostly a vehicle to display pictures of cats.

Now, there is such a thing as being detached and whimsical. Many filmmakers have used that style to show somewhat off-kilter stories with little moments of import that aren't filled with drama, so much as they are odd quirks that make the story and the film memorable. Wes Anderson has built a career on that approach; as has Taika Waititi, who actually has a small role in this film. But there really isn't anything memorable in this film because the only genuinely interesting character is Louis and he just does the same thing, over and over. The most interesting part was Act I, where director and co-writer, Will Sharpe, sets the stage for Louis' life. We reach a moment in the film where the whimsy comes to the fore, as we see the cats that Louis enjoys more than people begin talking to him in a fashion he finds perfectly understandable. But Sharpe doesn't persist with that and, instead, we just go back to Louis drawing and painting and his economic situation persisting and nothing really changing. There are no real moments of delight that either let us laugh at how Louis interprets the situation before him or, instead, give us insight as to why he sees things that way. At some point, I was expecting an assertion on his part in the same way the children's view of the world is explored in Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom or something similar. But, instead, Louis remains tediously detached from us, as we watch him go through the same routines and avoid the same problems and receive the same flack from his sister, Caroline (Andrea Riseborough) and on and on.

There's a known writer's issue in that storytellers sometimes find themselves in what feels like a perfectly-created world and they shy away from really telling a story for fear of wrecking that perfect image. There is no real change or transformation or development that happens in that story because that would be a change to the original creation. It takes a certain amount of will and desire to step past world creation into actual storytelling. Somewhere, Sharpe and co-writer, Simon Stephenson, didn't take that step. Is it because there really wasn't much story to tell about Wain other than what is shown in the film? That's debatable. In reading the actual Wikipedia entry on his life, it seems like there was more to draw from that which might have shown his progression into madness or even an accumulation of smaller facts, like the contrast between his seeming obsession with personal electricity that Sharpe and Stephenson repeatedly emphasize and how he returned from his time in New York with even less money than he came with because of an investment in a new type of oil lamp(!) There does seem to be room to explore in the story of his life, even if Sharpe wanted to maintain the seemingly whimsical approach. But the film just doesn't go there and ends up more like a display of his artwork with dialogue.

In the end, it feels like Sharpe and Stephenson are great fans of the artist and this was simply a paean to that fandom; as if just having Louis Wain on screen should be treat enough for the audience, especially given that he's portrayed by the perfect casting of Cumberbatch. But most biopics are actually a story of someone's life and this film simply didn't have much story to tell, by the cats or otherwise.