Cats the Musical

If you saw the first trailer for Cats, you’ve probably been bracing yourself for a cinematic disaster of epic proportions. That preparation will serve you well if you choose to see the finished film, a boondoggle of terrible source material mixed with direction so poor the Academy should repossess Tom Hooper’s Best Director Oscar. Watching Cats makes you feel like you’re slowly going insane. Some may think would be a fun and joyous experience, and perhaps with enough alcohol and a raucous crowd, that would be the case. But if you try to view Cats straight (as I did) it’s a mind-warping experience where nothing works. You’ve got a Tony-winning choreographer in Andy Blankenbeuhler and no idea how to shoot or edit his choreography. You’ve got every single actor fully committing to the bit, and yet they’re somehow rendered even more lifeless and creepy due to the awful VFX. And beneath it all, you’ve got a deeply terrible musical that has persevered for 38 year

Cats does not have a plot. It doesn’t even have sensible words. You will spend this entire movie wondering what a “jellicle” is (it’s a word from T.S. Eliot’s 1933 poem “Five-Finger Exercises, but for the purposes of the movie, it basically means “these goddamn cats”). The loose idea of Cats is that a new stray, Victoria (Francesca Hayward), comes into the world of the jellicle cats who are about to go to the jellicle ball where Old Deuteronomy (Judi Dench) will select one cat to ascend the Heaviside Layer to be reborn. However, the devious Macavity (Idris Elba), who has magic powers that no one else does for some reason, plans to eliminate the competition so that he’ll win the contest. But most of the movie is just cats singing about what kind of cats they are and then the film ends.

For a moment, let’s put the musical itself in a box and set it off to the side. We have to accept that a musical that ran on Broadway for decades has some kind of popularity or else it’s just a giant money laundering scheme (I’m not completely willing to rule out the latter possibility). For whatever reason, people have been drawn to Cats, so now it makes sense to adapt it into a movie. However, that movie is such a monument to directorial malpractice that Hooper should get a life sentence in director jail.

For starters, Hooper hired an immensely talented choreographer and then clearly had no idea how to shoot or edit that choreography. It’s clear a lot of work went into the movement, to the point where it feels like you’re attending a class on the subject despite your desire to never attend such a lesson, and then Hooper never gets a proper angle, and even if he stumbles ass-backwards into a good shot, he refuses to hold it for more than three seconds. The film is edited without any rhyme or reason, which is a problem when you’re making a musical and so much depends on timing and rhythm.

This leads to the second problem, which is that Hooper is apparently deaf, or at least his hearing is so poor he couldn’t tell that the sound mix was incomprehensible. You have a movie where characters are singing their explanation of how their world works and who they are, and you literally can’t hear what they’re saying because the instrumentation drowns everything out. This is particularly heinous at the showstopper number, “Memories”, when Grizabella (Jennifer Hudson) hits her high note only to suffer from the blaring noise of the instrumentation. That’s not to mention all the times in the movie where the sound rises and falls so dramatically that you can’t help but wonder if there’s something wrong with your auditorium’s speaker system.

Then there’s the Digital Fur Technology

™, and if I were in charge of a studio, I would do everything in my power to make sure Hooper never gets close to a film that requires visual effects. There are some shots where the technology “works” in that “works” means, “Yes, this is a believable version of a human-cat hybrid that will still haunt my dreams.” But overall, the VFX still look atrocious like a human face superimposed onto lithe cat bodies. That’s not to mention the terrible compositing work so that no one looks like they’re actually in the space they’re inhabiting or sharing space with other characters. There’s a scene involving a chorus line of cockroaches where the VFX look worse than the special effects from movies made in the 1930s.

Welcome to the journey

To call Cats a cinematic experience unlike any other does not do justice to precisely how mind-meltingly bizarre Cats is. To say it must be seen to be believed is to undersell just how hard it is to believe it even once you've seen it. Cats is a movie to make you feel sky-high even when you're stone-cold sober, to push an otherwise even-keeled mind into Joker-like peals of hysterical random laughter.

Does the movie "work" in the traditional sense, in the way that director Tom Hooper and his star-studded cast and crew probably intended it to? Not exactly. But I gave into its alien charms, and found myself on an emotional journey I never could have predicted. Follow me on my path below.

Step 1: Curiosity

Having never seen the Broadway show, I went into Cats with only a vague sense that it sounded bananas. The very concept of a movie about celebrities playing cats via intensive dance training and cutting-edge digital fur technology sounded like an intriguing bit of big-budget madness amid a sea of samey blockbusters and prestige pictures following predictable formulas.

So I approached Cats much in the same way that the cats of Cats approached the new cat, Victoria (Francesca Hayward), in the opening number: with caution, excitement, and no small amount of eagerness to figure out what its whole deal was, already.

Step 2: Disbelief

But that was where my ability to relate to these cats ended, because Cats quickly turns very, very weird.

Within the first 20 minutes, Cats introduces: the dumbfounding concept of Jellicle cats, which are basically just regular cats with more specific rules; the concept of a Jellicle ball, wherein a single cat is chosen to ascend to heaven; a house cat (Rebel Wilson) who commands a small army of dancing mice and cockroaches with human-child faces; an evil cat (Idris Elba) with teleportation superpowers; and a playboy cat (Jason Derulo) who sparks the uncomfortable realization that all these cats seem horny as hell.

All of this is way too much to process, but the joy and terror of Cats is that it doesn't really care that it's way too much to process. It keeps twirling and leaping and belting out show tunes, daring you to keep up while knowing damn well you can't.

Step 3: Begrudging respect

Say this for Cats: It commits. Hooper and his team present every single element of Cats completely in earnest. There's no winking and smirking about how silly this all is, no half-assing the musical numbers to signal they're above it, no apologizing for the nonsensical nature of everything we're seeing.

As a result, it's easy to get swept up in the world of Cats, however baffling it might be. The first half or so plays like the cafeteria scene in Mean Girls, as various cats show Victoria (and us) the ropes of Jellicle cat society — which cats have drama, which ones are bad news, which ones are feared or respected. The second half is overtaken by the Jellicle ball, as all these different cats show off for each other.

The level of craft isn't always up to the intensity of the dedication. Hooper's worst habit is slicing and dicing the dance numbers to the point where it's hard to tell what's going on, undermining the hard work and skill of his own stars. And the sets, while lavish, make the cats look simultaneously too big and too small; turns out there's no good way to scale bipedal mammals to mimic quadrupedal ones.

But as Jennifer Hudson ugly-cries her way through "Memory," or Taylor Swift purrs her musical ode to Macavity (Elba), or Ian Mc Kellen pretends to cough up hairballs, Cats becomes genuinely awe-inspiring. It's perplexing that all these people poured their blood, sweat, and tears into movie so singularly strange, but it's also touching, in a swing-for-the-fences kind of way.

Step 4. Disbelief again

Fortunately for fans of outsize ambition, any time Cats threatens to slide into boring respectability, it runs up against the one thing about this movie that never stops being weird. Which is that, again, these are people, but they're cats.

At my screening, the audience periodically broke out into contagious fits of giggling at moments that weren't overtly comedic. I can't speak to what others were thinking in that moment, but for my part, the feeling I was expressing wasn't so much contempt as the delirium that comes from extreme confusion.

I'd be watching Judi Dench emote intensely, and then I'd realize all over again that she was doing so from under several layers of makeup, costumes, and CG meant to make her look sort of like a cat, and something in me would snap. The human mind is famously flexible, able to acclimate to even the most extreme situations. But watching Cats, I learned that mine has its limits.

5. Euphoria

And yet, I can't deny the sheer exhilaration of seeing how far I could push my own imagination. Cats is a 110-minute exercise in disbelieving your own eyes, in feeling yourself becoming gradually unmoored from basic concepts like "time" and "space" and "reality." Have you ever wondered what it feels like to try and gaslight yourself? Watch Cats, and you might get a taste.

In the final moments of the movie, a character addresses the camera directly for the very first time, to relay the crucial message that "a cat is not a dog." It comes just as the film seems to be winding down, which is to say just as the audience is preparing to put this chaos behind them and get their minds back in order before exiting to the theater.

Instead, this number severed whatever tenuous connection to reality I still had. I gasped with laughter, I covered my face, I pulled at my hair, I clasped my hands over my mouth to keep from screaming. Cats had broken me, and I'd never felt happier.

The filming of Cats is a difficult matter, It isn’t just one of your holiday games, Each actor involved here looks mad as a hatter, When the trailer came out, we were CALLING THEM NAMES. It began with Cat poems from old TS Eliot, In the 80s, Lloyd Webber just put them on stage That was frankly a bit of a gamble for Andrew, but Coach-loads of punters made Cats all the rage.

Now Cats is on film, with many a lonely puss Played by performers of A-lister class. But the number of mammaries looks frankly erroneous And tails that appear to emerge from each arse. There are lots of big names here, names we see daily, Names that supposedly give us a lift. Nothing like Jonathan Pie or Bill Bailey, But names like James Corden, and – yes – Taylor Swift. The setting is London, it does look post-nuclear There aren’t any people, so maybe there were Bomb blasts – or maybe a bio disaster Causing cat-human mutants with digital fur. The twitching of ears on their heads is distracting

As they gaze at the greenscreen and sashay and crawl, It’s weird to behold them all gurning and acting, And why do so many resemble Darth Maul? Did director Tom Hooper intend this appearance? Did it make him feel happy – or cause him some stress? We have to assume that he gave it his clearance But THE MAN HIMSELF KNOWS and will never confess. These are the Jellicle felines of legend, All elbows and shoulders and undulant arms. Each male in the cast looks a bit of a bellend, And those bizarre whiskers don’t add to their charms. The Jellicles welcome Victoria: a new cat, Francesca Hayward’s the thesp with this role, She’s sleek, unlike Corden – well known for TV chat But it’s his size that reveals that he’s meant to be droll. And then Idris Elba comes on as Mc Cavity, (A boomy-voiced villain in anyone’s book) There’s a prominent gap in his penis locality. I honestly didn’t … well … know where to look. As Grizabella, Jennifer Hudson will sniffle Singing Memory, this movie’s moment of truth.

But it’s warbling warbling warbling piffle From a bag lady drama-queen obsessed with lost youth. The Jellicles’ leader is Old Deuteronomy Judi Dench has this part, looking very bemused. What’s with that extra big fur coat? You’ve got me. She looks bewildered and (like us) confused. Obviously, Ian Mc Kellen is in it, And he’s got a tatty old topcoat as well. The other cats’ nude state is clearly permitted. But why? That is something that no cat will tell. There’s another cat in it, by name Mungojerrie, Not the 70s pop group who once raised a cheer, With their Summertime chart hit that really was very Much better, more catchy, than anything here.

Ray Winstone’s the creepiest cat in this feature His Growltiger sends a sharp chill down your spine With his hissing he looks like he’s having a seizure, It’s scary – like adverts for betting online. When you notice these cats in profound meditation With a digitally created frown on their brow Their minds are engaged in a rapt contemplation Of the thought, of the thought, of what on earth to do now. “Pretend to be cats!” says a director. They reply … “Me? How?”

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt both delivered excellent Cats parodies this year, the latter of which imagined its own hilarious alternate history of how and why Cats came to be. But the best summation of Cats comes from famed musical theater director Hal Prince. Thoroughly stumped by his first listen to the Cats score, Prince asked Lloyd Webber if the whole thing was meant to be an allegorical exploration of the English politics of Queen Victoria, William Gladstone, and Benjamin Disraeli. As Prince recounts it, "He looked at me like I’d lost my mind, and after the longest pause said, 'Hal, this is just about cats.'"