AndrewBloom
5/10 4 years ago
[4.5/10] *Cats* is a terrible show. Look, I know that 1980 was a different time, and it made a statement of glamour and garishness that rang true at the dawn of the loud, over-the-top eighties. But it’s a vapid, goofy, cornball cartoon of a stage production. I can intellectually acknowledge the reasons for its success, but I’d be lying if I said I saw much artistic merit in it, from my admittedly haughty vantage point of four decades later.
*Cats* the movie is bad too. It is garish and nigh-incomprehensible in places and rough to look at for most of its runtime. But it is, in many ways, a faithful translation of the show, for good and for ill, to the silver screen. I am loath to slate director Tom Hooper and company too harshly for much of the film’s failings. They dutifully capture the bizarre, untethered from reality or taste trappings of the source material and give it the most honest translation to cinema you could expect. It’s still bad, but much of its badness is a product of the source material.
What’s fair to chastise Hooper and his team for are the additions that are unique to the film. Hollywood demands things that Broadway, the most mainstream of theater outlets, does not. So this version of *Cats* includes several elements that are entirely absent from the original play, like a protagonist and perspective character, and an antagonist, and a love story, and...you know...a plot.
Most of these are fine enough but totally unnecessary. Little is added from wasting Idris Elba’s considerable talents in the guise of a malevolent feline Willy Wonka. An undercooked romance does next to nothing to spice up this hairball of a musical. And more directly framing and explaining the meaning and purpose of the “Jellicle Choice” is probably a necessary concession to general audiences, but doesn't actually provide a backbone to what one enterprising tweeter accurately described as a series of character introductions before one of the cats gets to die.
But for what it’s worth, one of the few changes Hooper makes that’s worth applauding is the addition of Francesca Hayward as Victoria, the protagonist cat. The character isn’t exactly well-written, but still, making her the audience surrogate for the bizarre world of these felines is a canny choice that helps add some meager amount of sense to this bewildering dervish of spasms and fur. Beyond that structural choice, Hayward gets one of the few new songs in the piece, and “Beautiful Ghosts”, as the rare track not weighed down by the synth and sonic suckitidue of the eighties’ musical stylings, soars as a more intimate and moving number amid the rest of this aural assault.
She’s also one of the few performers in the piece whose expressions and gesture shine through the awkward costuming and computer-generated grotesquerie. That’s the thing about Tom Hooper’s direction. Film fans make fun of his close ups and smaller approach to big musicals, but he gives his actors just enough rope to either swing like nobody’s business or hang themselves.
Those extended takes and frequent tight shots on the performers’ faces means that actors like Hayward are able to make an impression, breathing life into a player whose personality is ninety percent defined by body language and facial expressions of innocence and curiosity. By the same token, Ian McKellen, who could read a sandwich shop menu and make it moving, has the acting chops to take a novelty song and render it heartbreaking given the cinematographic focus on his performance.
Conversely, Hooper’s approach gives other performers who are either less adept or simply hobbled by the film’s off-putting visuals, nowhere to hide. Jennifer Hudson, who can sing the hell out of the famed “Memories”, distractingly overemotes throughout. Frankly, so does most of the cast. Some of that’s assuredly a deliberate choice among the performers for a big movie that is more style than substance, but often it’s laughable at moments when it’s not meant to be.
Worse yet, *Cats* is the unfortunate type of movie musical when, for however many of the singers can’t act, more of the actors can’t sing. The film tries to mask Idris Elba’s contributions, by giving him half a line to croon here and there, and Judi Densch muddles her way through, but the awkward talk singing that’s present throughout and unavailing vocal tones from the likes of Taylor Swift of all people leave the already middling songbook of the movie in cat-clawed shreds.
And yet, somehow, that’s not the biggest misstep in the picture, which can only be the array of god awful CGI monstrosities that Hooper parades around from scene-to-scene. To be charitable, you can view the look of the titular cats as ambitious, something meant to represent the imaginative anthropomorphism of the stage show updated with animatic tricks and tidbits that wouldn’t be possible on the stage. Once again, you can feel Hooper and his team channeling the spirit of their predecessor and trying to represent it fairly.
But good lord is this movie ugly. The seemingly hot-glued-on faces tenuously attached to the felines’ writhing bodies plummet into the uncanny valley and never crawl their way out. The twitching tails and ears don’t feel like expressive parts of the singing animals; they feel like bewitched appendages jerking and moving on their own. The backdrops have the same unreality of a Baz Luhrman feature or, god forbid, the live action *Alice in Wonderland* films, lending to the sense of this thing as one long fever dream. And the cats seem to grow or shrink in size with no rhyme or reason. Rest assured, whatever the source material’s musical faults, the movie version of *Cats* matches it with visual sins just as glaring.
That is, if you’ll pardon the expression, the truth about *Cats*. Many of its worst features -- its meager score and imbecilic lyrics, its nonsensical premise, its plotless lumpiness -- came along with the blueprints. Those things could have been ignored or redone (and some of them were), but at some point you’re just making an entirely different movie. Still, plenty of the off-putting things about this cinematic clump in the litter box are choices that Hooper made: the hideous visual approach, the miscast performers, the feeble attempts at bantery comedy.
With that, though, this film may still be the truest adaptation of the source material we’ll ever see. It is large and loud and dumb and garish, and it smacks the audience in the face with every choice it makes. For better or worse, in 1980 or 2020, on the stage or on the screen, that is *Cats* through and through.
