(Image courtesy of Universal Pictures)
Two of our intrepid CineGods took one for the team and descended into the murky world of the eagerly-dreaded Tom Hooper adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s CATS:
WADE MAJOR: Well, Mark. It’s just the two of us. We’re taking one for the team.
What the hell did we just sit through today?
MARK KEIZER: I know one thing I didn’t sit through: the original stage production upon which this dreadful film is based. Cats, based on T.S. Eliot’s, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats and featuring music by Andrew Lloyd Webber, debuted in London in 1981. It’s since been performed in too many countries and too many high school auditoriums to reasonably name. Despite its enduring popularity, the whole enterprise always struck me as a tourist trap musical notable only for the brief mention of its signature song, Memory, on The Late Show with David Letterman in 1985.
I’m not the first person to wonder why Webber’s musical took so long to be made into a movie. And about 30 seconds into Tom Hooper’s gaudy, laborious and wholly uninvolving misfire of a film version, I won’t be the first person to wonder why it didn’t take longer. Blame here rests entirely with Hooper. His career is a bifurcated one. His non-musical films, including The Damned United and 2010’s Best Picture Oscar winner The King’s Speech stay emotionally engaging, even rousing so, despite that ever-so-British coat of polish that can often buff out the oh-so-human pockmarks and recognizable moments of real life. His musicals, including 2012’s Les Misérables, of which I am a half-hearted fan, are something altogether different. Les Mis and Cats are both ponderously over-the-top. They treat every song like an 11 O’Clock Number and every emotional beat like the fate of the world is in the balance. It’s too much and yet, also, not enough. Wade, which Tom Hooper is the real one?
WADE MAJOR: Mark, you had a summation of the film that had me belly-aching with laughter. I implore you to make it a part of this Slam.
I would say both are the real Tom Hooper — every director has a Jeckyll/Hyde tendency. Making a great movie is not a forgone conclusion. Creative work is hard work every time out. You start from scratch every single time. That’s why nearly every great director has made a masterpiece and a stinker back-to-back at some stage.
But I can’t fully blame Hooper for this monstrosity, which turned out very much to be just as I feared: “Showgirls with fur.”
I had heard the stage production was equally dreadful and, like Webber’s Starlight Express, basically a cheesy 80s gimmick wrapped around a bunch of songs which pretentious Manhattan theatre-goers would be gullible enough to see and rave about at dinner parties simply because it’s NEW! SENSATIONAL! WEBBER!
Look… it’s nearly two hours of a psychedelic version of The Alley’s Got Talent starring a bunch of 30s/40s era fake art direction and name actors pretending to be cats against badly blue-screened studio recreations of period London. They audition, they perform, Idris Elba plays an evil cat who does magic or something, Judi Dench looks like Bert Lahr as the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz, someone wins the contest at the end and flies off in a balloon to… do… something? Reincanate? Via what power? Nobody knows. Nobody cares. You just want the whole monstrosity to stop pecking your eyes out so you can go grab Thai and go to bed.
Horrible. And yes, it has a scene where Tom Hooper effectively cribs a chunk of Busby Berkeley’s work in 42nd Street and recreates it with a chorus of dancing cockroaches on a cake.
I. Am. Not. Kidding.
That is actually in this movie.
In our other slam of the week on Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker I marveled that nobody, and I mean NOBODY at Disney batted an eye at their crappy script for what was to be the finale of the greatest movie franchise of all time. Nobody either cared or had the talent to judge what a bad piece of writing it was. Probably both.
That goes quadruple here. Who thought this was a good idea? Who thought this was a good expenditure of money? Whose agents didn’t tell them that this might not be a smart career move? What executives at Universal saw the dailies THAT FIRST DAY and DID NOT immediately fire everyone and pull the plug?
Inexcusable on every level.
MARK KEIZER: After a while two things happen: 1) they become runaway trains but nobody (except Disney) has the guts to fire a big name director in the middle of a big budget movie (directing aStar Wars project has become the least secure gig in Hollywood) and 2) the suits figure it’s beloved IP so, you know, I’m sure it’ll work out fine.
Having no foreknowledge of the source material (poem or play), a creeping sense of dread invaded my thoughts within moments of Hooper’s introduction to our environment, a tacky, burnt-orange chiaroscuro of an alley where the cats fight, scavenge and, far too often, splay their legs. These not very funny felines, played by an array of hardworking performers given CGI cat fur and tails, were derisively mocked upon release of the film’s first creepy and bizarre trailer. Fear not, the cat designs are actually the only consistently engaging aspect of the picture, although I was secretly hoping that a cutting room floor monstrosity from The Island of Dr. Moreau would enter and send the picture to an early death.
The actors cannot be faulted because they have been betrayed at almost every turn. It starts at the top, with Victoria (newcomer and star ballerina Francesca Hayward), who, when the movie opens, is unceremoniously and cruelly dumped into the alley. She is the audience surrogate, discovering the environment with us. The problem is she’s has nothing to play as a character and Hayward seems to be limited to one facial expression. But as she circles the other cats, each initially weary of the other, we are introduced to the whole lot. There’s Mr. Mistoffelees (Laurie Davidson), whose namesake tune is one of the film’s only highlights. Idris Elba, one of the most commanding actors working today yet who seems increasingly incapable of choosing quality material, plays Macavity. He’s the villain of the piece although he spends most of the movie popping into the picture to say some toothlessly menacing thing and then disappear in a puff of brown smoke.
Jennifer Hudson should sue the production for workplace negligence. She plays Grizabella whose primary function is to sing Memory. Hudson does get that honor, but her character is a simpering, pathetic one-dimensional mystery. She shows up about six times, each appearance more pathetic and weepy then the last. When called upon to sing Memory, it’s an overly emotional rendition with Hooper presumably envisioning a flood of tears running down every movie theater aisle in the world. But I’m just not sure what Hudson or her character have done in the previous 100 minutes to make us suddenly dissolve in a puddle of tears.
The only performance that resonated with me was Ian McKellan’s take on Gus the Theater Cat. His song about the good old days was a highlight, mainly because it reminded me of the good old days before I entered the theater to watch this horrible film. Its real problem is easy to figure out: there are no three-dimensional characters. There’s no conflict. There’s no story. There’s no one to root for. In fact, when I left the theater, freed from the shackles of bad filmmaking, I texted you, Wade. This is exactly, and I’m not making this up, what I texted:
First half: let’s meet every cat.
Second half: every cat sings a song.
The end.
WADE MAJOR: I would love to end it on your brilliant summation, but instead I’m going to tack on my own, because there’s really no end to how much one can deservingly savage this abortive monstrosity of a catastrophe.
Also, because I need a Rotten Tomatoes pull quote out of this, I’m just going to say, with all seriousness, it took me nearly half the movie to realize they were saying “Jellicle Cats” (whatever the hell that is) and not “Genital Cats,” which would have been significantly more fitting.
###