A Reel Review: CATS

In the last decade, director Tom Hooper has made excellent, award-winning, elegant character-driven pieces such THE KING’S SPEECH (2010), and THE DANISH GIRL (2015). But he has also ventured into experimentation, with his adaptation of the musical LES MISERABLES (2012), capturing songs live on set as they were sung. Here in 2019, he ventures out even further with another musical adaptation, CATS. 

A cat named Victoria (Francesca Hayward), is abandoned in a London alley, where she is welcomed by a group of felines calling themselves Jellicle cats. She learns that on this night, one cat will be chosen to ascend to the Heaviside Layer (some sort of cat heaven), which is decided by Old Deuteronomy (Judi Dench). Their plans are disrupted by a group of evil cats, led by Macavity (Idris Elba), who kid(cat)naps his rivals in a way of eliminating his competition and become the chosen one. 

CATS does not have much of a plot. In fact, it has no plot at all. Story is replaced by songs, and somewhere in all of the endless lyrics is an explanation of the supposed narrative, where one cat on this night will be chosen to leave this world. CATS lacks the basic structure that any film is required to have, and is a redundancy of songs where new cats/characters are introduced over and over. There is no depth of character and world-building, and with a complete lack of fundamentals, it is impossible to invest in any character or what they are trying to do. 

The musical numbers are well-composed and performed, and the choreography excellent, but CATS gets butchered in the editing. No shot stays on the screen for more than five seconds, and it makes for a choppy and headache-inducing movie. The production design is gorgeous with its high colors and neon lights, but its impossible to take it in when the shots cut away so quickly, and that also takes away from the choreography. It’s not clear if this was done on purpose or if Hooper and his team ran into issues in the editing room, but CATS certainly lacks any breathing room.  

The visual effects team has created some bizarre and nearly grotesque half-person, half-cat creatures. No fur-suits are used, and instead we are treated to actor’s faces imposed on digital cat-bodies, which oddly retain their human hands and feet. It simply doesn’t work, as it not only looks fake but their fur does not flow or move with all the dancing around. The rules at work (if there are any) are all over the place; some cats wear clothes and shoes while others don’t, some walk on two feet, others all fours. Some of the close-ups look all right, but CATS cheats by having most of the film take place at night, and the closing daylight shots really expose the shitty CGI. Worst of all, we have horrific mice with children’s faces imposed on them and dancing cockroaches with human faces which look awful in style and execution. There are also issues with scale, as the cats seem way too tiny for their oversized surroundings. 

Acting is a mixed bag. Francesca Hayward as a trained ballerina gets to show off her moves, and her singing sounds very good, but her acting amounts to staring at other cats with her mouth hanging open. Other actors are completely mistreated; the great Ian McKellen gets embarrassed by having to lap milk out of a saucepan, and the two heavy-set actors, James Corden and Rebel Wilson, are reduced to fat-jokes as they fall and go boom. Jennifer Hudson comes off relatively unscathed, as she belts out a powerful rendition of the iconic Memory. Taylor Swift amounts to a cameo, and her Macavity: The Mystery Cat number is a rare highlight of the film. 

There is a philosophy in art and movies called the Uncanny Valley, which suggests that humanoid objects which imperfectly resemble human beings provoke uncanny, eeriness, or revulsion in viewers. Tom Hooper’s CATS is a perfect example of that, and if the film had any sort of structure, character, or ANYTHING to latch onto, that Valley could have been overcome. Instead we are left with a movie that has all the characteristics of a hairball; shapeless, repugnant, unwanted, and destined for the sewer. 

BOTTOM LINE: Fuck it