Every
family has at least one crazy cat person, and if you think otherwise I have
some bad news for you: That crazy cat person is probably you. Thanks to the
internet, the goofy beasts are everywhere, but in Louis Wain's day,
appreciating cats as anything other than rat and mice catchers was a bit of an
oddity, if the bizarre film I just watched is to believed. The
Electrical Life of Louis Wain, a shiny new Amazon original movie,
chronicles the life and trials of the world’s first feline meme creator and does
so in a way that is occasionally sweet, occasionally tragic, and almost always
weird, if not always in a good way.
The Electrical Life,
like its main character, exudes some really weird energy right off the bat and
does not stop doing so throughout thanks to some truly schizophrenic filmmaking
(which is not always a bad thing). There are some funny bits that underscore
the eccentricity of the Louis Wain character (portrayed by Benedict
Cumberbatch), but heartbreaking circumstances in his life often bring the film
crashing back to reality. The former sequences are usually done with some real
creative flair, with interesting camera angles, color palettes, and music
(which uses the otherworldly sounding theremin and musical saw to great
effect), the latter with much more traditional shots and score. This chaotic
combination of weird and melancholy often works in the movie’s favor, but also
keeps it from having a concrete identity of its own. The same can be said of
its main character, who is still a bit of a mystery to me even after spending
two hours with him. But I suppose it’s also annoying to me when biopics reduce
a real historical figure down to three or four easily identifiable character
traits, so I don’t know what I would have had them do that was different than
what they actually did.
Ultimately I feel like The
Electrical Life should have gone all-out with the weird instead of
only utilizing it half of the time. Weird and sad are not exclusive , after
all, but you would not know it from watching this with the shifts in tone and
visuals. As it stands, I ended up asking myself questions like “what exactly is
this movie?” and “what are the themes they’re trying to explore?” and “wait,
did the subtitles just translate that cat?” a couple of times, pulling me out
of the story as a result (and this confusion only gets progressively worse as
the character slowly loses touch with reality). But there is no arguing with
the fact that The Electrical Life is a competently made film,
from the directing to the scriptwriting to the acting (especially Felix Wilde,
Windsor Wilde, and Norbury Ackland, who all play Peter the cat at various
stages in his life and should be given a good amount of treats for their good
work if they haven’t already). I just wish it had more of a concrete idea of
what it was.
The Electrical Life of Louis Wain is
a harmless watch that won’t change your life but does a pretty good job of
celebrating the lives of those that not only put up with cats but also, against
all reason, enjoy doing so. Check it out.
The Electrical Life of Louis Wain is
now available on Amazon Prime.
This review was first published in
The Keizertimes on November 26th, 2021. Visit at http://keizertimes.com/
Good job.
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