WHAT A DOG!
New ‘Cats’ stinks up litter box
In a world laden with movies dramatizing the serious, painful divisions threatening so much of the planet, along comes the film version of “Cats” with the express intention of ignoring all that. It’s just out for a little feline diversion, with enough calculated pathos for nine lives, never mind one. The songs you may know, at least “Memory”; they’re by Andrew Lloyd Webber and various lyricists, chiefly T.S. Eliot, whose volume of 1939 poetry “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats” inspired the virtually plotless musical smash premiering in London in 1981.
Now we have the film version, directed by Tom Hooper of “The King’s Speech” and “Les Miserables.” It presents your best and presumably final opportunity to witness Sir Ian McKellen, Jennifer Hudson, Idris Elba and Taylor Swift in whiskers and digital fur.
Is it the worst film of 2019, or simply the most recent misfire of 2019? Reader, I swear on a stack of pancakes: “Cats” cannot be beat for sheer folly and misjudgment and audiencereaction-to-“Springtime for Hitler”-in-“The Producers” stupefaction.
“You just don’t like the topic,” our 14-year-old told me this morning. True enough. I wouldn’t pin it on the species, necessarily, though I do have a problem or two with the stage version. I have a problem with the score, and with the parts of the show where the cats aren’t singing. Other than that I love it. When my mother and niece told me they slipped out of recent national tour performance at intermission, I thought, well, nothing’s for everyone, and I’m not alone in this world.
In hindsight, “Cats” on stage is easy enough to assess: It’s a two-hour cat video, mysteriously transported back to the pre-cat video era. The film’s screenplay by Lee Hall and director Hooper opens up the original show’s junkyard setting. We’re in a late-1930s/early 1940s alternate universe version of London’s West End. Much of the action takes place inside a theater called the Egyptian. The Jellicle cats are having their annual Jellicle Ball. Wise Old Deuteronomy is working through her an- nual decision regarding which puss is going to the Heaviside Layer and will be thus reborn into a new and presumably better life, with better musicals.
Old Deuteronomy is played by Dame Judi Dench, although the first sight of her on screen in “Cats” is more like: “Damn! Judi Dench?!” The digital effects makeup is a lot to work with, or around, even for a sterling veteran such as Dench. McKellen, as Gus the theater cat, mugs so shamelessly in an attempt to yank our heartstrings, it’s like impromptu heart surgery performed by a man in a cat suit.
The comedy “additions” to the original material include hairball-horking; James Corden eating a lot of realisticlooking garbage in close-up; and an amplified role for the wily antagonist, Macavity (Idris Elba, charisma wasted for the first and presumably last time in his career). The film version hands Macavity a kidnapping plot of sorts, as he whisks his fellow realityshow competitors for the Heaviside Layer off to a barge on the Thames.
In a smallish role Taylor Swift cats around as Bombalurina; she also co-wrote the conspicuous new song “Beautiful Ghosts,” music by Lloyd Webber. More prominently, the astounding ballet star Francesca Hayward single-handedly gets us through “Cats” alive, as the sympathetic newcomer and audience-identification figure, Victoria.
Hooper is not my man for film musicals. He shoots everything the way he did in his film version of “Les Miz”: with a woozy hand-held camera for extra “immediacy” and “reality,”
“CATS” — ZERO STARS
which is “stupid” in this context. The decision to present tiny little dancing mice and roaches, some of which are eaten by Rebel Wilson’s aggravating Jennyanydots, is merely one in a series of unfortunate events. As for Jennifer Hudson’s Grizabella: She sings the living daylights out of “Memory,” weeping what appear to be genuine human tears all over her digital fur through most every stanza. Whatever happened to taking care of the interpretation and leaving the crying to the audience?
Audiences unfamiliar with the material may be stunned to learn how little there is to “Cats,” not just in terms of narrative but in terms of everything besides narrative. It’s a kitty music hall revue, and a pushy, needy, antiquated one at that. (When the synthesizers come pounding in, it’s 1981 all over again, in the worst way.) Two final thoughts: One, props to Robbie Fairchild as Munkustrap, whose nonverbal Coarse Actingreactions to Old Deuteronomy’s epilogue really are a wonder. And two: As Longfellow wrote, into each life some rain must fall. This week it’s not raining cats and dogs. It’s raining “Cats.”