Review: "Cats"

I saw two movies today at the Cartlon Cinema for cheap Tuesday matinees. The first film I saw was Robert Eggers' rather weird and horrific The Lighthouse. The second was also weird and horrific.

It was Cats! The hot mess of an acid trip of a movie!

The near-universal pans have been focusing on the practically non-existent plot and the CGI disaster that are the cats themselves. But there is a strange dichotomy with Hopper's Cats that one must grapple with when trying to review the film. You have the musical upon which the film is based, and you have the cinematic adaptation. Do you tear the film apart because the musical itself is bad? Or is it the filmmaking decisions that make this movie so terrible, so infamously horrible, so quickly?

As I often say -- why not both?

Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical is easy to dismiss as not exactly great theatre, but that's because so many people expect a conventional narrative-driven piece. Cats has no intention of being a plot-driven musical. Instead, it is widely noted for being a song sequence of cats introducing themselves, all while the patriarch cat tries to decide who will be sacrificed-- uh, I mean, who will be chosen to go to the Heaviside Layer, a cat version of heaven. Much dancing and singing ensues. Think of it as a sort of middle-brow pseudo-surrealism, a tripped-out musical fantasia of song and dance that has the dream logic of stream-of-consciousness writing.

The songs, unfortunately, are mostly unremarkable, and go on far too long (how many times does one need to hear the phrase "Jellicle cats"?), but by all accounts, live stage versions of the musical have fantastic dancing and performances. Cats is more of a formalist musical: by forgoing narration, we should be focusing on the more formal aspects of the play: the songs, the music, the dancing, the design.

And this is where the film adaptation goes so massively wrong.

The songs are unmemorable, yes, and the dancing has mostly been chopped up in the editing room. But what about the design? Oh! The design. If we're supposed to marvel at the technological feat of turning the actors into cats, the filmmakers are sorely mistaken. These look like cheap CGI cats with human faces pasted on, a feline uncanny valley. It's not even particularly well-rendered CGI, either. Famously, the producers almost immediately shipped out an "improved" version of the film after early screenings had negative feedback. But I remember seeing the trailers for the film and cringe-laughing, heavily impacted by major schadenfreude. The cats, simply put, look terrible -- and the basic scaling of the actors to their surroundings seems off: aren't cats a bit bigger than this? It's most obvious in the Train Cat's song (I can't be bothered to remember his name, despite it being sung a thousand times), as they stroll along a railway. They look more like the size of squirrels. And speaking of rodents...

There are dancing mice and cockroaches introduced in the Jennyanydots number that re-appear throughout the film, and these babies are pure nightmare fuel. Even worse than the Busby Berkeley-esque showgirl cockroaches are the faces of children slapped on the CGI mice. These mice get thrown around rather violently, but at least they don't get eaten alive by the cats, unlike their insect friends. It's a doozy of a directorial decision.

But there are other decisions by Hooper that made me scratch my head. One annoying tendency in the film is the use of silent breaks for dramatic effect: there are simply too many of them, and they just don't work. If the songs seem to go on forever, the film's use of these moments of silence make it worse. I must also really question the sound mixing of the film, which is often sloppy, possibly because the vocals were supposedly recorded live. More than once I thought I was in Robert Altman territory, with voices overlapping one another in an unpleasant way.

The supposed show-stopping song Memory is slipping fast from mine. It's a snooze, other than cringing at Hudson's over-performance of it. Hooper must've thought that hey!-- sticking the camera in Anne Hathaway's leaking face won her an Oscar, maybe it'll work again. Spoiler: it doesn't. Jennifer Hudson has been accused of over-acting before, but here it's a very valid criticism. Her performance is wretched, and I think it's because of Hooper's direction: "Emote! More emotion! Cry! Warble your voice! Pause unnecessarily during your phrases!" It's awful, my friends, and she deserves better. She's a talented singer, but... oh boy. This sticking the camera in the faces of actors is a Hooperism that sometimes works (The King's Speech) but often doesn't (Les Misérables), and the camerawork in the film is often of the shaky-cam variety. It's old hat now, and never really worked in the first place. Hold your damn camera still!

There's also something else that must be addressed. I'm not sure if it's the fault of Webber or Hooper, but there's a rather unsettling eroticism to Cats. Writhing figures, heavy breathing, a practical cat orgy at the Jellicle Ball fuelled by cat-drugs. It's uncomfortable for what's trying to pass itself off as a family film. It's made worse by the Taylor Swift cat's breasts and her performance as sex kitten. There's also the rampant fat-shaming that's supposed to be comedic, but instead reads as just lazy, obvious humour. James Corden is clearly having a great time, but I must ask why he is when his entire character is just one big fat joke.

And what's up with Idris Elba's Macavity? What a bizarre plot device this is: he's the "Napoleon of Crime" that has magical powers to make the Heaviside Layer nominees disappear to a boat on the Thames. I think it's an idea to introduce some sort of narrative suspense into the film, but it comes off as silly and unnecessary.

Silly and unnecessary. Yup. That about sums up this hot mess.