Tag: musical

First, a disclaimer: CATS is rough.

I do not open with this fact as a revelation; we all know it’s rough, and you didn’t open a review of CATS expecting to hear anything else. I’m telling you CATS is rough up top because I’m about to say some very charitable things about CATS, and I don’t want them to be mistaken for endorsement. Make no mistake, CATS is, with all due love and respect, an absolute mess, a lurching, neurotic beast that stubbornly refuses to become fun, cute, accessible, or entertaining. 

But! Stay with me here.

I knew I’d be approaching this with a more generous mien than most reviewers; many complaints seem to be lodged by people who’ve never seen a musical. A lot, if not most, of general confusion and revulsion might confuse, but likely not appall any audience that’s been to the theatre in the last month. The unnerving movements of the actors? The plot absentia? The creeping unsurety that any given cat may be about to have sex with any given cat? That’s just CATS, baby! It’s not my bag, but the musical’s got enough prestige that it’s clearly at least some people’s bags, and as an actor myself, it feels untoward to mark these points down against it. Kudos to the rest of the world for noticing that those theatre folk can be awful uncomfortable to be around, but we’ve known that for centuries now—so yes, it’s never made certain, but I can’t consider “what even are Jellicles, even??” a legitimate avenue of criticism of CATS, especially when there are so, so many more interesting avenues of criticism worth taking. (Not to mention, you ungrateful jerks, there’s a song right up front listing multiple defining characteristics of Jellicles!) 

In fact, CATS, at times, feels oddly beholden to its stage roots, not in its sets or in the bizarrely exemplary Sir Ian McKellan’s Gus the Theatre Cat, but in its intoxicating community theatre energy. The cast is stuffed with actors, dancers, and performers of varying levels of fame and talent, but they all seem earnestly and uniformly convinced of the work’s quality, barely able to contain their pride at their monumental performance, and if you just breathe in this energy, it’ll–well, not sweep you away, exactly, but certainly pass your evening, watching Jason Derulo in a genuinely impressive percentage of the film beyond the number where he yells “MILK!” Every actor, dancer, singer, or just…kinda…famous person is really, really, really trying here, and while there are more misses than hits, it can slip through the cracks and entertain you if you let it. Nothing is phoned in or half-assed; Academy Award winner Jennifer Hudson would be well within her rights to roll her eyes through “Memory” and her terrible makeup, but she absolutely doesn’t, and it saves about as much as can be saved. Even much (justly) maligned Rebel Wilson doesn’t shy away from the bonkers scene she’s given, and it results in, sans the cringing one-liners, one of my favorite scenes in the movie. 

I’m going to say more good things about CATS in a minute, but just so I can get them out of my system first, let me rattle off some of its more noxious failings. 

Director Tom Hooper, he of the undercooked and overwrought Les Mis, has turned his baleful gaze upon another musical, with some similarly useless results–his close-up camera is a repellant match with the CGI cat disguises. Worse, and damningly, CATS is a musical dominated by dance and movement, and Hooper has no idea how to film either, forcing us to watch world-class dancers through a shaky-cam behind a trash can, hiding underneath a table, or on one particularly taunting occasion, a snap zoom out across the Thames. To be fair to Hooper, this might be intended as somewhat of a mercy; if you’ve seen any promotional photos or the trailer and thought “that must get easier to look at,” you’re an optimist. The cats are, in a word, horrid, and never become less horrid as the movie goes on. The eldritch fur, the way the actors’ faces are stapled on to their bodies, the incomplete CGI that will intermittently cause parts living and otherwise to phase through each other–every part of the the visual design is both poorly conceived and executed. The movie understands this on some level and cloaks many of its larger players in some kind of costume, but this only makes the reveal all the more upsetting: just as you think Cat Idris Elba is acquitting himself reasonably well in this horrorshow, he’s shown without his coat and somehow Cat Idris looks more naked than a regular naked Idris might.

But let me pose you a question: what was the last AAA, big-budget movie you saw that approached this level of catastrophic unpleasantness? Not in a sleazy or lazy way–we get a J-horror remake or family animated based on an old board game once a month–but a manner this genuinely mystifying? What was the last movie you saw with this kind of pedigree, this kind of talent and money and cultural recognition and history, and yet still feels like you’ve lost your place in a Catholic mass? What was the last movie you saw at your local Regal or AMC that sat you down, powered through your japes and jeers, and made you ask, out loud, to your friends sitting next to you and the folks behind you, now bonded in your common experience: “what the hell was that?”

For this, I think I loved CATS. Don’t get it twisted, I assuredly didn’t like it, and would think twice a half-dozen times before recommending it to anybody without (to borrow a phrase from another sadomasochistic film) unconventional desires. But in today’s film market, there’s something almost refreshing about the hideousness of CATS, a movie made by hundreds of talented and experienced professionals that still somehow looks like this,and for that, it has my admiration, if not my respect. Towards the end of my screening, somewhere around the fourth or fifth time a heavily costumed Dame Judi Dench turns to camera, she intones with solemnity and a twinkle of joy, “a cat is not a dog,” and I heard someone a few rows back sincerely say, “fuck, it sure isn’t!” And that, perhaps, is a perfect microcosm of CATS. Will you find it great, enduring cinema? Probably not, but it’s your own fault for coming here in search of it. You want good art, go see Parasite or Little Women. You want to spend an unfathomably long hour and a half learning some names of some cats, and what their whole deal is? CATS has you covered, and if you meet it on those terms, you just might enjoy it.