I’m not putting a spoiler tag on this. It’s fucking Cats. Get a grip.
I saw Cats today. Voluntarily. On purpose. It’s important you know that I wasn’t coerced in any way, nor was the friend who accompanied me. Of our own free will, being of sound mind and body, we exchanged real human money for the experience of seeing Tom Hooper’s Cats on the big screen, in the company of other real human strangers. Not that our session was packed – aside from the two of us, there were only five other people in attendance, all older to middle-aged women – but the two ladies sitting near us not only cried during Jennifer Hudson’s bifurcated rendition of Memory (more of which shortly), but applauded during the credits. Their happy reactions, audible in the theatre’s yawning silence, added a further layer of unreality to what was already a surreal and vaguely disturbing experience, but once we emerged in the aftermath, stunned and blinking like newborn animals, their enjoyment helped us cobble together a theory about who, exactly, Cats is for – if such a film can truly be said to be for anyone.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start at the beginning.
Here is the first thing you need to know about Tom Hooper’s Cats: the cats, who are played by human actors in CGI catskins, are meant to represent cat-sized cats, such that all the human-sized props and settings are likewise meant to loom proportionally large around them. Meant to being the operative phrase: instead, the film’s sense of scale and proportion are those of an Escher drawing, consistently inconsistent. It’s a problem of props as well as backdrop: in one scene, a cat wears a ring as an oversize bracelet, while in another, the cats are big enough to stand at a human-sized bar. No matter how comically big the chairs or tables or other accoutrements compared to the cat-actors, the surrounding space – height, depth and breadth – is never enlarged accordingly, such that the intended atmosphere of cat-sized actors playing in human-sized spaces is never achieved. Coupled with the frequently cartoonish designs and colour palettes of the – sets? CGI backdrops? mixes of same? who knows! – the impression is rather of human-sized cat-people inexplicably playing with giant novelty items, while the bad CGI adds acid-trip levels of confusion to what their bodies are doing at any given time.
Here is the second thing you need to know about Tom Hooper’s Cats: the entire musical has effectively been re-engineered around a new star character who – and it physically pains me to type these words – is functionally Tom Hooper’s genderbent Mary Sue catsona. Look into my tortured eyes: I have been in the goddamn trenches of the Mary Sue Discourse Wars, and I do not want to use this term in this particular manner. Nonetheless, the facts are these: our new Protagonist Cat, Victoria, is introduced in the opening when The Token Human throws her away in a sack. She is a beautiful white cat who all the other cats are immediately in love with. She shares in all their musical numbers, is hit on by all the handsome boycats, interrupts Grizabella’s rendition of Memory with her own, new song, comes up with the idea of having Mr Mistoffelees rescue Old Deuteronomy from Macavity, singlehandedly brings Grizabella into the Jellicle Ball, starts singing Memory for her to get her started again, and is then made a Jellicle at the denouement. She’s like Ebony Dark’ness Dementia Raven Way and Bella Swann’s cowritten fursona, and I hate that I’ve been on the internet long enough to write such a highly cursed sentence, but here we fucking are.
As this terrible knowledge came to me in the cinema, I flashed back to seeing Cats on stage as an impressionable pre-teen, and to watching a VHS recording of the 1998 performance a year or three later. Amygdala twitching desperately, I recalled the presence of a pretty white cat in both these versions – one of the kittens, who might have been called Victoria – who was the first to touch Grizabella when implored to do so during the climax of Memory. Possibly this is so; just as possibly, I was having some sort of seizure brought on by the endless parade of smooth, befurred Ken Doll crotches gyrating beneath CGI tails that twitched the way cat tails only do during sexual pleasure or territorial spraying. I could Google it and find out, but I fear what terrible images I might encounter in the process. Either way, I stand by my assessment: regardless of whether Victoria is a pure OC or a background NPC elevated to protagonist status, functionally and emotionally, she is Tom Hooper’s catsona, and I look forward to a member of the furry community gently sitting down with him in the coming months to answer whatever questions he might have.
Here is the third thing you need to know about Tom Hooper’s Cats: by trying to explain the musical via Victoria’s journey and some original snippets of dialogue, aided and abetted by the terrible CGI, Hooper draws constant attention to the fact that Cats makes no fucking sense and never has, thereby breaking the cardinal rule of any good Cats production. As a stage show, the success of Cats lies in the initial establishment of atmosphere: mystical, dreamlike, weird and a little bit magical, so that when the spandex-clad performers finally slink onstage, we’re ready to just accept it as a Coherent Thing instead of asking questions of it; questions like Is the Rum-Tum-Tugger DTF? and What the fuck is a Jellicle?. There’s always been a certain ambient horniness to Cats, but when you can physically see a troupe of talented actor-singer-dancers flinging themselves about while belting out Andrew Lloyd Weber numbers, it’s not the only thing you have to focus on. But in Hooper’s Cats, the CGI is so terrible that it constantly obfuscates the physical effort of the actors, clumsily blurring their bodies so that, even if something impressive is being done, it still looks like that scene in The Matrix: Reloaded when Neo fights all the Agent Smiths.
At very least, you’d hope you could retreat into the sountrack, but aside from a couple of decent performances, the best I can say of the music is that it was clearly audible. The nature of this particular gaffe made more sense to me when I remembered that Tom Hooper was also responsible for the 2012 version of Les Mis, which managed to star two men (Hugh Jackman and Russell Crowe) who cannot actually sing in the range required for either of their characters. In restructuring Cats to make space for both Victoria and the new spoken dialogue, Hooper changed which cats sing about themselves, as opposed to being sung about, and has done this without paying any real attention to whether the actors cast in those roles can carry a tune in a bucket. It almost has the feel of a casting retcon, like he went in wanting big names for Old Deuteronomy (Judi Dench) and Jennyanydots (Rebel Wilson), but only realised afterwards that Dench, not famed for her singing voice, had been given a traditionally basso male part with some of the biggest, deepest lines in the show, while Wilson, who can technically sing but is usually cast as someone who does so with more enthusiasm than talent (as per Pitch Perfect), is more sung about than singer.
As such, we get a Deuteronomy whose lines are warble-spoken, not truly sung, and a pratfalling Jennyanydots who’s given extra spoken asides to make up for her minimal singing time. (One of these lines is a snark that, as the Rum Tum Tugger is hitting some very high notes, he must’ve been neutered – not an original joke at the best of times, but when your audience is already trying desperately not to think about all the Blank Cat Genitalia being crammed into their eyeballs, it’s especially unwelcome.) Robbie Fairchild does a decent job as Munkustrap, and my personal dislike of James Corden’s stock-in-trade Bumbling Man aside, he’s at least well-cast as Bustopher Jones. Jason Derulo has a lovely voice as the Rum Tum Tugger, but the rhythm of the song is missing, the beats given over to visual rather than vocal gags, and giving the traditionally dark, smoky Macavity number to Taylor Swift’s Bombalurina, who performs it with a studied, high-voiced breathlessness, is a waste of both song and singer. Idris Elba, who actually is Macavity, barely sings at all; he does, however, spend the first half of the movie brooding in an oversize fur coat, so that when he finally strips it off, you’re doubly struck by the sight of his vacant cat-crotch.
Skimbleshanks (Steven McRae) is about what you’d expect but with more tap-dancing, and is inexplicably the only cat who wears pants, which outfit makes him look like a very specific type of highly caffeinated theatre twink on Instagram. (I tell a lie: Jennyanydots briefly wears clothes, but only after she unzips her actual fur and then eats some cockroach-people with human faces who look like early PS1 Harry Potter graphics, oh god why my EYES.) Mungojerrie and Rumpleteazer, performed by Danny Collins and Naoimh Morgan, is shifted into an entirely different key and comes across more like recitative than not, and as with Dench’s Old Deuteronomy, Ian Mackellan’s Gus the Theatre Cat is more quavery-spoken than sung, with no chorus singer to frame and contrast his original parts of the melody. Laurie Davidson’s Mr Mistoffelees, rather than being suave and confident, is stammering and shy, and while I might’ve appreciated that in a different production, here it means just one more song that isn’t sung on tempo or with passion.
And then we come to Memory, performed by Jennifer Hudson, which ought by rights to be the showstopper – and indeed, if you ignore the disconcerting visuals of Hudson’s Grizabella sobbing through her CGI catface as she sings, vocally, it’s far and away the strongest, most affecting performance in the film. But because Victoria Raven Way Swann is our protagonist, Hooper literally CUTS MEMORY IN HALF so that she – or rather, Francesca Hayward, the actress bringing life to Hooper’s catsona – can sing an entirely NEW song called Beautiful Ghosts, which is… a Thing, after which there is a considerable interlude before Grizabella gets to sing Memory again.
I’m tired, guys. I’m so very tired. The light is fading, and I have but little strength.
The fourth and final thing you need to know about Tom Hooper’s Cats is that, as you watch it, your mind starts to latch onto small, specific incongruities as a way to deal with the overwhelming madness of the visuals – things that do not matter in comparison to everything else, but which nonetheless shine as vividly as the last hallucinations of a drowning man. Around the time that Old Deuteronomy first appears, for instance, the doubtless underpaid and overworked computer people responsible for executing Tom Hooper’s CGI vision stop giving the actors hand-fur and claws, so that Cat Judi Dench has people-hands throughout (as do various others who previously had paws). I don’t know what experience Tom Hooper has with directing in CGI, but I suspect it to be minimal, and have thus developed a mental image of him as a Monty Python directorial caricature, bescarfed and smoking a cheroot, yelling across the soundstage in an old-timey Hollywood accent, “Don’t worry about it, we’ll get it in post!” while his more knowledgeable underlings pray quietly for death. Mungojerrie, a boy cat, is depicted as a calico, which is technically possible, but very unlikely. I applaud the genderflipping of Old Deuteronomy in principle, but because Hooper is a goddamned coward, it came at the expense of cutting the line about him – or her, rather – burying nine wives, because god forbid Naked Cat With People Hands Judi Dench be a lesbian. Idris Elba’s Macavity is brown-furred and well-built, a fact we can see even as Taylor Swift sings about him being thin and ginger, just as Mr Mistoffelees, who describes himself as being all black, has a white bib, hands and face. All the cats get stoned on catnip, but only some wear shoes. Why is this? What have we done with our lives, collectively, to bring us to this point?
As Grizabella ascended to the Heaviside Layer in a floating chandelier balloon and the happy ladies in our row began to applaud the credits, I had a realisation about Cats that came sharply into clarity the moment I sat down with a much-needed tankard of frosé. Though ostensibly meant for general audiences, Cats is, in reality, a highly niche film meant for fiftysomething+ fans of the original musical who haven’t seen anything CGI-heavy since they accompanied their formerly tweenage children to a matinee showing of Mortal Kombat in 1995, and who thus look upon Hooper’s efforts as a revelation. These moviegoers aren’t internet-savvy, either; they don’t know what a furry is, and as such can look upon Rebel Wilson scratching her invisible cat vagina, legs spread wide, without flashing back to goatse or 4chan or something they saw on tumblr at a tender, more formative age (or last week, for that matter). They just want to see some singing cats, and are gloriously unburdened of any modern cultural baggage surrounding Hooper’s presentation of same that prevents them from enjoying his great works.
I am happy for them, this joyful group of viewers who emerged from Cats not only unscarred, but moved. Meanwhile, my friend and I staggered out as if from a recitation of Vogon poetry and went promptly to the nearest bar, which blessed us with its tender liquid mercy.
Enough. I can write no more. Remember me fondly to mother; I can hear the angels calling.
DON’T SEE CATS.
shattersnipe: malcontent & rainbows 