Mark Reviews Movies: CATS

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 19, 2019

"Did you like it," asked the woman next to me when the screening of Cats had finished. I succinctly and politely responded in the negative. "I guess you have to like that sort of thing," she responded.

Ever since that exchange, I have been racking my brain to figure out what "sort of thing" this big-screen adaptation of the Broadway musical Cats is. For the life of me, I cannot determine, calculate, or even divine what this movie is, what purpose it serves, and what line of thinking brought it to life.

For better or for worse, it's definitely a version of Andrew Lloyd Webber's stage musical, in which actors dressed as cats sing songs adapted from short poems by T.S. Eliot and dance whenever Webber decided that the repeated words, lines, and choruses of his songs had become even too repetitive for him. The appeal of the show, perhaps, is composed of its whimsical nature (Eliot's poetry is the foundation for that), the spectacle of its design and choreography, and the fact that it's appropriate for the whole family. The standard joke, until the show closed in 2000 after almost 18 years, was that three things in life were certain: death, taxes, and a production of Cats appearing tonight on Broadway.

One can deduce at least part of the show's appeal from this movie version, brought to the screen by co-writer/director Tom Hooper, co-screenwriter Lee Hall, and probably a board of production executives who pushed forth every bad idea they had. The cast is big and filled with recognizable or obvious talents (who will go unnamed in this review for the sake of whatever dignity may remain in being associated with this movie). They sing with gusto and pretend to be felines with varying degrees of attempted verisimilitude. The dance numbers are an energetic mixture of ballet and its relatively recent successor modern dance, as well as some break dancing when a certain "curious" cat appears.

Everyone on screen is clearly into the whole production. After all, this is Cats, the long-running Broadway perennial and the much-awarded musical and the beloved show synonymous with the spectacle that the theater can create. They must have had no idea what was to come, because somebody decided that a game cast and a re-creation of the Broadway-brand of spectacle wasn't enough. This version, after all, would be a movie. Movies in this day and age aren't about fanciful costuming, seeing human bodies in their natural form in motion, or letting an audience imagine, well, anything.

Movies nowadays have to be real, and hence, somebody or some committee decided that all of the actors in this movie adaptation had to look like actual cats. They couldn't just make animated cats, of course, because that would look silly. No, they still had to be people, but they also had to be cats.

The result is far less whimsical than it is horrifying—seeing human beings with digitally implanted fur and tails sticking out just above their buttocks and heads with moving feline ears. The human faces remain, although they're decorated with whiskers and painted—either actually or digitally—to match the coloring of their faux-cat bodies (sometimes covered in fur—oh, the dreadful possibilities—coats).

On top of all that nonsense, Hooper appears to have implanted his actors—now only vaguely looking human because of all the computer-generated costumes—against digitally inserted backdrops, which are often based in a gaudy and neon-lit color scheme, in certain scenes, meaning that we're sometimes watching layer upon layer of fakery. Some of the collars around the characters' necks seem to move on their own, as if the visual effects team incorporated one of those augmented-reality applications so popular on social media.

The story, as a group of stray cats sings about their names and their personalities to win a competition for a new life, is almost non-existent. The songs are nonsensical and become dull even before the repetition of certain words or phrases begins. The dance numbers, like the songs, just happen and end without any warning. The moral of the story is that you should treat cats with respect and never assume that a cat is a dog.

Again, one can discern how all of this might have been less of an issue, if the people behind this production trusted in the material enough to concern themselves more with its potential qualities and worried much, much less about trying to make it all look "real." Cats is a nightmare brought to life.

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