Review: 'The Electrical Life of Louis Wain' is a biopic that wallows too much in its subject's quirks

Movies ask us to believe we are watching epic space battles, wizards performing magic and superheroes flying and fighting — and we readily accept them all as real, or at least plausible. But Benedict Cumberbatch, a man in his 40s, playing an overly energized 20-something, as he does in the first half of “The Electrical Life of Louis Wain,” is a bridge too far to suspend disbelief.

Casting Cumberbatch in the title role is the central problem of this biographical drama, but not the only one.

Wain, as we meet him, is a many of many talents — composer and inventor among them — but earning a steady income is not one of them. That’s the main concern of his dour oldest sister, Caroline (Andrea Riseborough), who oversees the household that includes herself, Louis, their dotty mother (Phoebe Nicholls) and their four younger sisters, three of them still of school age. The Wain family has some level of prestige, but not the money to maintain it. They’re barely able to scrape buy to hire a governess to teach the younger girls.

When a governess arrives, in the form of Emily Richardson (played by Claire Foy), she’s a bit unsure of herself, awkward and rather eccentric. In short, a woman that the oddball Louis falls in love with almost immediately — and, in spite of the social scandal, he marries her in short order.

To provide for his wife, and his sisters and mother, Wain reluctantly takes a job as illustrator for the Illustrated London News. The editor, Sir Wiiliam Ingram (Toby Jones), likes how fast Wain draws his pictures — and figures he can get twice as many images out of him as another artist.

Years later, when Wain’s drawings are supplanted by a new technology — photography — it seems the artist is headed for unemployment. Making matters worse is news that Emily has breast cancer, a terminal diagnosis in the 1890s.

Wain attempts to lift Emily’s spirits by getting her a kitten. This was something of a novelty in Victorian England, where cats were not considered fit pets, and were seen either as mouse control or feral strays. Wain starts drawing whimsical portraits of Peter and other cats, and Sir William is so taken with the drawings that he gives Wain two pages in his Christmas edition — and setting into orbit Wain’s career of drawing cats as objects of silly delight.

Director Will Sharpe and his co-screenwriter, Scott Stephenson, aim to tell Wain’s story from youth to old age, which means they have to set a blistering pace to cram it all in. Because of that speed, the movie loses a lot of nuance; for example, one would be hard pressed to differentiate Wain’s sisters besides Riseborough’s Caroline and Hayley Squires’ Marie, the center of a tragic subplot. 

It feels as if Sharpe is trying to bring to his observations of Wain’s life the same level of charming humor and ridiculousness as Wain brought to his cat paintings. That’s a hard assignment in a life story that touches on a terminal disease, mental illness and the buildup to World War I, and Sharpe’s kaleidoscope-colored images aren’t up to the moment. The oppressively bubbly narration, by Olivia Colman, is not much help.

Cumberbatch works mightily to overcome the incongruity of his physical age with the character’s youthfulness, and the effort backfires when he continues to play into Wain’s more childish tendencies when he’s an older man. Foy is quite charming in an underdeveloped role, though she and Cumberbatch never really spark — something that’s unfortunate in the attempt to chronicle an “electrical life.”

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‘The Electrical Life of Louis Wain’

★★

Opens Friday, October 22, at the Megaplex Jordan Commons (Sandy), Megaplex Legacy Crossing (Centerville), Megaplex at The District (South Jordan), Megaplex Thanksgiving Point (Lehi) and Megaplex Geneva (Vineyard). Rated PG-13 for some thematic material and strong language. Running time: 111 minutes.