Cats

Cats is the closest Hollywood has ever come to replicating a hallucinatory fever dream on the big screen.  It's so odd and indescribable, it's almost worth seeing.  There's something so off about every decision director Tom Hooper (2012's Les Miserables) has made here, and yet, you can't take your eyes off of the screen.  We're probably never going to see a movie like this ever again.  At least, we should hope so.

But then, perhaps his desire to bring Andrew Lloyd Webber's stage musical to cinematic life was doomed from the start.  The original show, adapted from T.S. Eliot's poetry collection Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, is famous for largely being a fairly plotless spectacle.  It was the outlandish costumes and stage effects that turned the 1982 Broadway production into the stage sensation of its day, and the fourth longest running musical in New York history.  It's lack of plot and emphasis on music and theatrical wizardry meant that just about any audience member could be entertained on some level, even those who did not speak English, but wanted to enjoy a show while they were visiting the city.  The original show is more or less a revue where a large group of street cats introduce themselves to us in song, and compete for the chance to go up to the "Heaviside Layer", a kind of cat-heaven where they can be reborn into a new life.

To be fair, Hooper and his co-writer Lee Hall do try to tell a little bit more of a story here.  It kicks off when a cat named Victoria (ballet dancer Francesca Hayward) is abandoned on the street by her human owner, and finds herself in the world of the "Jellicle Cats", who hang out on the streets of London out of the sight of humans.  Victoria acts as our eyes into this strange world, which is made even stranger by some of the visual choices on display here.  In trying to make his actors appear cat-like in size, the filmmakers use oversized sets and props whenever the cats are supposed to be singing and dancing in human environments like abandoned homes and milk diners.  But the movie kind of overshoots, making its actors appear much smaller than they should.  It at times looks like we're watching a Broadway musical performed by a cast of fantastical little people from another world.  And other times, the cats appear much larger than they should, creating an overall air of imbalance.

On stage, the actors portraying the cats mostly wore elaborate costumes and spandex that emphasized flexibility for the dancing.  This being a big budget film being made in 2019, that certainly will not do.  We need "digital fur" turning the cats into some kind of mutant hybrid between human and feline.  The creatures all have human faces with CG touch ups, like cat ears that move, or whiskers that twitch from time to time.  Their bodies are covered head to foot in fur and a cat-like tail, though they have human-like feet.  A few cats even wear clothes for some reason, such as the evil Macavity the Mystery Cat (Idris Elba), who spends most of his screentime watching the action from afar, and kidnapping the various cats who hope to ascend to the Heaviside Layer, plotting to take their place instead.  There's also Old Deuteronomy (Judi Dench), who is covered with fur, yet inexplicably wears a fur coat.

The whole thing goes beyond the Uncanny Valley into some kind of unnatural realm where you sometimes find yourself wondering if you're really seeing what you're looking at.  In one of the more bizarre sequences, we have Rebel Wilson portraying an overweight cat who prances around an oversized set with even smaller actors, who are supposed to be portraying the mice and cockroaches that dance with her. (It gets even stranger when she starts picking random cockroaches out of the dancing line, and swallowing them whole.) Other unforgettable sights the movie treats us to is the invaluable Ian McKellen (as Gus the Old Theater Cat) lapping up milk from a dish, to Taylor Swift as a cat named Bombalurina sprinkling pixie dust-like catnip down on the crowd during her musical number.  While all this is happening, Grizabella the Glamour Cat (Jennifer Hudson) watches, and gets to sing the show's most popular song "Memory", in the hopes that she will be picked to go to Heaven and live her life over.  She sings the song well, but the way the camera focuses so close on her face that we can see the tears from her eyes mixing with the fluids coming from her nose is kind of off-putting.

For all of its weirdness, there's a certain lifelessness to Cats that I don't think is intended.  There is just no feeling or message to any of the big musical sequences.  When the mischief-making cats Mungojerrie and Rumpleteazer trash a home during their big number, there's just no sense of fun or joy.  When the magical cat Mr. Mistoffelees (Laurie Davidson) shows off his mastery of the impossible during his song, it lacks energy.  And when the flamboyant "ladies cat" Rum Tum Tugger (Jason Derulo) struts his stuff, he just doesn't sell it like we expect.  I don't lay all the blame on the actors.  They're all talented, and doing what they can.  It's just the camera angles and the sporadic effects work sometimes make these musical numbers a curiosity more than a thrill.  We know we're supposed to be having fun watching this, but we're not.  And that right there pinpoints the film's main problem.  The people behind this were so fixated on technology and creating the illusion of cat-people that they forgot to give the music sequences and choreography the life they deserve.

It's funny that I noticed a few people walk out early during the middle of the film.  Did they not see the trailers?  Did they somehow not know about the show itself?  Cats is downright bizarre, and I walked in expecting that.  What I did not expect is how lifeless and forgettable the movie would be as a whole.  It's certainly weird, but it only goes so far before you start looking for some genuine entertainment value, and aside from a few fleeting moments, there's little on display here.

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