Benedict Cumberbatch’s portrayal of eccentric Edwardian artist famed for his cute cats is brimful of star cameos but gets lost in mannered performances
Here is a sentimental biopic that buries you in a fusillade of quirks and tics and flicks, an overegged pudding of a film with producer-star Benedict Cumberbatch once again going into Sherlock Turing mode. He plays eccentric Edwardian artist and illustrator Louis Wain, a lively and arguably brilliant man who might today be considered neurodiverse, and who certainly suffered from depression. But for all his gifts, Wain finally became famous for just one thing: his hugely successful cute drawings of cats in jokey poses for the Illustrated
London News. In
Britain – and the US, where he was also popular – Wain could claim to have reinvented the cat as a lovable domestic familiar, the feline version of Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit. But Wain was stricken with grief at the early death of his wife, naive about money, burdened with the need to provide for his mother and sisters and finally reduced to poverty.
Claire Foy plays Wain’s beloved wife Emily, Andrea Riseborough is uninterestingly directed in a single-note performance as Wain’s shrill and shouty sister; Toby Jones is his long-suffering editor; Phoebe Nicholls has almost nothing to do or say as his mother; and Olivia Colman supplies the droll narration. There is a host of star cameos, including the engagingly weird casting of Nick Cave as Wain’s real-life defender HG Wells, who gallantly made a public plea for financial help for Wain as the champion of all things feline.