The Artist’s Way

Cinema has long been obsessed with the complex lives of impossibly talented artists – their childhoods, their loves, their fears – to understand the minds that created the most breathtaking work in history. The Electrical Life of Louis Wain joins the canon – and Rafaela Sales Ross looks back on her favourites in the subgenre that brought us here.

“You are not a bad person, you’re a complicated person”, lovingly says Lynne to her fretful-looking partner Andy in Miloš Forman’s 1999 Man on the Moon, a biopic about the infamous comedian Andy Kaufman. 

“Complicated” is a throwaway term often used to convey the intangible complexities of artists, a euphemism for when the threshold of concrete definitions is too fragile to navigate. Cinema has long prodded the lives of troubled creatives, from painters to musicians to writers, exploring the maladies that so commonly plague those whose work withstands the test of time. 

Will Sharpe’s dreamlike The Electrical Life of Louis Wain is the latest addition to the ever-growing subgenre of biopics centred around anguished artists. It features some of the archetypal tropes of the form, from a central character constructed to gift a prominent lead actor with an emotionally-charged performance, to the heart-wrenching score paired with an ethereal cinematography.

Here, eccentric illustrator Louis Wain (Benedict Cumberbatch) muses on the many disadvantages that might keep him from finding a romantic partner, describing his mind as ridden with “crippling anxiety and constant nightmares”. Love, a fickle feeling long off his plans, suddenly presents itself in the shape of cheerful governess Emily, and the prospect of courtship leads to a period of terrifying self-reflection. 

It is a rare moment of serendipity that Emily and Louis should find each other in the late 1800s, two non-conforming members of a society built on conforming. Together, they defy unwritten rules of the period and marry against the concerned pleas of Louis’ battalion of sisters, who directly depend on their elder brother after the recent passing of their patriarch. Enveloped in the blissful bubble of fresh love, the duo moves into a little country cottage, made home by the arrival of Peter, an impossibly cute tuxedo cat. 

At the time, cats were perceived solely as rodent killers. Having one as a pet only added to the public’s perception of Wain as a hopeless outcast. A talented illustrator with a penchant for drawing animals (“I don’t really draw people”, he tells a stranger he meets on a train), it is only natural that Louis would start portraying Peter and other felines. And, in yet another serendipitous stroke of luck, his quirky cat drawings become a hit, evolving from newspaper spreads into cat-themed books that shoot Louis Wain, until then the underdog, into unlikely stardom. 

Wain’s few years of fame dissipate as quickly as they come, sending him into a spiral of debt and hopelessness, idleness uncovering the unbearable grief of unprocessed losses long buried under a pile of now dried-up commissions. His sisters end up a near-homogeneous bundle of spinsters, the family doomed without any prospects of marriage. By the time Louis’ little sister Marie is sent into a mental institution after years of struggling with schizophrenia, he starts to show early signs of the same disease, although a diagnosis is never confirmed. 

From this point onwards, The Electrical Life of Louis Wain leans into a sense of dizzying disassociation, life moving around a man who is at times drifter, at others uninhabited island. Sharpe lingers on Louis’ eyes, an unspoiled bridge to precious times of unfiltered joy as all else decays – his skin, his joints, his mind. Parallel to this examination of the intimate is a study of society’s ruthlessness when it comes to dissentients. As if a callous accordion, public opinion contracts and expands around this man who can’t ever win, neither can he conform to fit it nor further rebel to entertain, a conundrum far from exclusive to Sharpe’s poignant account. 

At Eternity’s Gate 

Only an actor in full command of his craft could entirely obliterate any traces of himself in order to embody a figure as complex as French painter Vincent Van Gogh, which is why Julian Schnabel’s 2018 biopic At Eternity’s Gate is such a triumph: it finds its leading man in Willem Dafoe. 

“I just want to be one of them”, Dafoe’s unmistakably coarse voice says as the screen remains in darkness, searing loneliness drenching each word. “Them”, here, stands for the nameless mass unaffected by the maladies that ravage Gogh, the ones that ever further the gap between the man and the bliss of ordinary life. This is a fitting way to start this dizzying experiment in melancholia, a film built upon the gut-wrenching woes of Van Gogh’s agonising existence without ever falling into mawkishness. 

Maudie

Plagued by arthritis and constantly berated and belittled by her brother and aunt, middle-aged Maud Dowdley jumps at the prospect of a job as a live-in maid to grumpy fish peddler Everett. In an attempt to improve the man’s rough-looking abode, the woman begins to paint, colouring walls and shelves with drawings of bright fields and animals. 

Maudie recounts the life of a gentle woman denied gentleness, from her days in poverty and isolation to having her work celebrated by the likes of Richard Nixon. This tender portrayal of a social outcast-turned-revered artist benefits from Hawkins’ innate empathy, the actress imbuing her rendering of Dowdley with unguarded kindness. 

Mr. Turner

“I felt there was scope for what could be a fascinating film because of what may seem the tension between this very mortal, in some ways flawed and very inspired individual and this epic work, this spiritual way that he had of distilling, capturing and expressing the world”, said British filmmaking jewel Mike Leigh of his biopic of painter J. M. W. Turner. 

It is this precise dichotomy between the flawed and the pristine that fuels Mr Turner, a study of a man dealing with the horror of looming obsolescence, a prospect more terrifying than death for many artists. Longtime Leigh collaborator Timothy Spall shines with a performance so committed it saw dozens of letters sent to the BBC in protest of his contracting buttocks in one of the film’s most controversial sex scenes. Spall’s grasp on Turner’s scattered brilliance is stunningly captured by cinematographer Dick Pope, who turns Leigh’s ode into a moving painting. 

Ed Wood

Columbia Pictures dropped Tim Burton’s biopic of Edward Davids Wood Jr,. a.k.a. “The Worst Director of All Time”, after the filmmaker insisted on shooting it in black and white. Burton’s reasoning was simple: people had only seen monochrome pictures of legendary Hungarian actor Bela Lugosi, whose relationship with Wood was at the centre of the film. 

Luckily, Disney stepped in to back Ed Wood, and Burton’s choice proved smart, greyscale cinematography amplifying pristine make-up work transforming Martin Landau into Lugosi. The actor was later awarded an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his spine-tingling performance as the man who immortalised Count Dracula on the silver screen. 

Burton darling Johnny Depp feeds off Landau’s extravagant delivery and steps it up a notch in his embodiment of Wood, an unapologetic dreamer whose public defence of crossdressing endangered his career but enhanced his charmingly odd appeal. 

The Disaster Artist

Keeping up with the theme of “worst of all time”, James Franco’s 2017 The Disaster Artist chronicles the making of Tommy Wiseau’s 2003 cult darling The Room. A family affair, the film stars James Franco as Wiseau and his brother Dave as Tommy’s best friend Greg Sestero. 

The Disaster Artist is a valentine to the dreaming underdog. James Franco is sucked into the rabbit hole of Wiseau’s weirdness and spat out an even odder creature, a mashup of self-indulging Hollywood pseudo-auteur and, well, non-Hollywood pseudo-auteur. The result is a deliciously funny and endearing homage to the phenomenon that is The Room, and the unusual mind of its creator. 

Man on the Moon

When comedian Andy Kaufman is diagnosed with advanced lung cancer, his family is sceptical the prognosis is true. The clan is still riddled with suspicion when they gather in the hospital where Andy awaits test results. “It’s Cedar Sinai, a showbiz hospital”, says one of his relatives. 

The quip, funny yet terrifying, is a testament to Kaufman’s commitment to his over-the-top persona, epitomised by Jim Carrey in Miloš Forman’s 1999 film. Carrey’s dive into method acting went so deep he famously spent months without breaking character. The actor’s process was later explored in the 2017 Netflix documentary Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond, with his devotion heavily criticised by peers including Martin Freeman, who publicly labelled Carrey’s stunt in Forman’s biopic as “the most self-aggrandizing, selfish, narcissistic fucking bollocks I have ever seen”. The infamy resulting from this unorthodox approach clouds Carey’s ingenious performance to this day - a sign that, perhaps, it wasn’t worth it after all. 

The Hours 

“Dearest, I feel certain I am going mad again”, soulfully admits Nicole Kidman at the start of Stephen Daldry’s 2003 psychological drama The Hours. Adapted from Michael Cunningham’s 1998 Pulitzer-winning book of the same name, the film explores the lives of three women interconnected by Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel Mrs Dalloway, one being the author herself. 

A forlorn study of despair, Daldry’s film dwells on Woolf’s known struggles with depression and suicidal ideation to reflect on the crushing aspects of the social constraints of womanhood, from the inescapable expectations of motherhood to the excruciating loneliness that comes with dedicating your entire life to others.

This loneliness, heavy and all-consuming, is beautifully conveyed in one of the most accomplished portrayals of the emotional turmoil that often fuels creative brilliance. It abstains from glorifying a process only made possible by immeasurable pain - a principle Sharpe fully grasps in his heart-wrenching tale about Wain.  

Rafaela Sales Ross (@rafiews) is a proud Brazilian currently living in Scotland. She has a Masters in Film and Visual Culture and is a researcher of the portrait of suicide on film. Rafa, as she likes to be called, loves Harold and Maude and writing about the exploration of death, existence and legacy on film.

The Electrical Life of Louis Wain is in UK cinemas now.

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