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| Francesca Hayward and Robbie Fairchild in Cats. Image courtesy Universal Pictures. |
Reason
and sanity are not things to be found in Cats.
Rather, the loopy, unfortunately and mildly enchanting Broadway
adaptation is all things and no things at once. Somehow, despite a
brilliant lack of cohesion or basic plot logic, this film drew a
bunch of famous folks – Idris Elba! Taylor Swift! Judi Dench! Jason
Derulo! – to lend an air of respectability to the lunacy. Perhaps
I'm missing something indelible about a show that ran for many, many
years on Broadway. Or maybe the film adaptation is the fever dream of
ego-driven idiots.
I
think Cats is about a
talent show in which the winner is reincarnated or something along
those lines. Aside from the stars mentioned above are Jennifer
Hudson, Ray Winstone, Ian McKellen, Rebel Wilson, and James Corden.
Ballerina Francesca Hayward serves as the audience surrogate
exploring what tries to be a mystical world of feline majesty.
Everyone is dressed like a cat, they have weird cat names and do
quasi cat things that are far sillier than ever intended. There are
many songs tossed in because this is a musical, including a song
Swift sings that is well outside her capabilities. Then everything
ends on a rather banal shot meant to mean something important to
director Tom Hooper and Andrew Lloyd Webber.
Cats is an audacious calamity,
wrong on almost every front and on nearly every level. Sometimes the
film is bizarre and accidentally enchanting, littered with impeccable
scenery devouring by Elba, McKellen, and Wilson. It tries to hit so
many tones and have so many layers it misses all of them, dashing
through emotions at unimaginable speeds and with no control. Cats
is madness with a $90 million budget and a director with no clue what
to do with it, the perfect recipe for an expensive cluster best
viewed on hallucinogens.
With two hours of screen time to fill
though Cats can't keep the insanity rolling. It's in those
moments where the film's legitimate incompetence comes to light,
bringing the terrible fun to a frustrating halt. Like the CGI, which
looks dreadful and incomplete, as if they gave up about three
quarters of the way in. Hooper fails wildly staging the musical
numbers, most notably in the two renditions of Memory. This is
the showcase song, and the film has the very experienced Hudson on
hand to sing it. This should be the easiest win for this film, but it
ends up completely mucking the whole thing up. The emotions wrought
from the song land with a thud, due to a mix of Hooper failing to
establish the right tone, strange choreography choices in the second
version, and general framing and editing flaws that fail to convey
the song's melancholy. Hudson is game and tries her best, but it's
hard to succeed when everything around you is en fuego as it is in
Cats.
If any one thing kept this film going
though, it was the audience at the screening I attended. I've never
sat with an audience as splendidly sincere and sarcastic as the one
who soldiered through Cats with me. Every little cat pun or
dumb, awkward cat movement garnered a wicked groan or one of those “I
cannot believe this is happening” laughs. Some folks applauded
after a few of the musical numbers – Memory was not one of
them – because somehow applause is the only acceptable way to
appreciate insanity, even if no one behind it is around to hear it.
It was a hoot to watch it with folks, a shared experience that will
be difficult to replicate in the future. Too bad this five-star
audience had to sit through a one-star film.
Review:
One out of Five Stars
Click
here
to see the trailer.
Rating:
PG
Run
time: 110 minutes
Genre:
Musical
tl;dr
What
Worked: Audience
What
Fell Short: Everything
Else
What
To Watch Instead:
Singing
in the Rain, Umbrellas of Cherbourg
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