Embracing the Jellicle Madness

Movies as audacious and experimental as Cats come out of Hollywood about once in a generation. And especially in a time when major studios are only concerned with safe bets, it’s a miracle that a movie like this was made. On the one hand there is the factor of the idea being a tested property: a long-running, successful musical from Andrew Lloyd Webber (based in turn on a series of poems by T.S. Eliot). And that the digital technology could be innovative on a level to attract large audiences. But on the other hand, Cats is a show so abstract and ridiculous and famously incomprehensible where the novelty and energy really can only hope to work in an intimate theatre setting, that a movie adaptation can be nothing other than an awful idea. However, I am so glad that Tom Hooper, esteemed director of The Kings’ Speech and Les Miserables decided to make the movie in spite of that.

Cats is a mesmerizing anomaly, one of the few movies in recent memory that had me grinning from ear to ear for its first twenty minutes (and again at various points throughout the film). From the very start it forecasts itself as a deeply weird and bewildering experience unlike anything else we’ve encountered in a cinema for years. Nothing in it quite works but everything is so passionately bold, that you can’t help but admire it. As a work of cinema, Cats is a terrible, awful movie, and yet I’ve enjoyed few films this year more.

There’s barely a plot so to speak, the story being moved along through songs almost all of which are merely introducing various cats each with the end goal of becoming “the Jellicle Choice”, which essentially will allow them to ascend to heaven and reincarnate. Apart from this, there’s no momentum or general direction, not much in the way of world-building or character development through any of the musicals’ wholly meaningless songs, and only one consistent point of view in the form of the mostly passive Victoria the white cat (Royal Ballet star Francesca Hayward), leaving it difficult to invest seriously in anything. Cats has more in common with a ballet than traditional narrative cinema, it’s all about the spontaneity of the moment unique to live performance that cinema cannot replicate, and the movie is constantly struggling to find a way to bridge that divide. In the meantime, the film feels like an especially high budget dramatization of the most whimsical childrens’ picture book, designed to teach kids about different animals –only they’re all cats, and very very strange cats.

Much has been said about the CGI in this movie used to merge human actors and general cat anatomy (though with maintained human hands, feet, and body shapes) into a single hybrid monstrosity. Yes, these creatures are unnerving and creepy, but just as alluring for those same reasons. You can’t take your eyes off Dame Judi Dench (as Old Deuteronomy) and her whiskers looking like a female Cowardly Lion, or Sir Ian McKellen (as Gus the Theatre Cat) licking milk out of a bowl and saying “Meow”. And of course the fetishistic nature of such cat-people can’t be avoided, all the actors and dancers’ skin-tight suits being digitally modified to look like fur, and thus you have a cast of practically naked characters elaborately leaping, gyrating and frolicking around with somewhat uncomfortable yet absolutely intentional sexuality: a film tailor-made for furries.

The brazenness of this just makes it more enrapturing though, it’s unabashed commitment with darling sincerity to characters like Rum Tum Tugger (a hilariously committed Jason Derulo) and Bustopher Jones (a typically unfunny James Corden). There is a villain of the piece, the mysterious and envious Macavity, played by Idris Elba in one of his most humiliating performances, though an astonishing Ray Winstone as Growltiger might challenge him. Alongside Rebel Wilson (as housecat Jennyanydots) and her shockingly horrible ad libs, Taylor Swift (as Bombalurina), Steven McRae (as Skimbleshanks the Railway Cat), and Laurie Davidson (as Mr. Mistoffelees the magician), it’s Jennifer Hudson as the sad and forsaken Grizabella who’s trying the hardest and who through the musicals’ most famous song, “Memory”, Hooper is desperately trying to milk the same Oscar-calibre performance he got out of Anne Hathaway in Les Mis.

Speaking of which, as one of the films’ general positives, Hooper has learned how to properly shoot a musical. He doesn’t shy away from wide shots, uses almost no Dutch angles, and is fairly dynamic in capturing the dance sequences and following and editing them with the right amount of ecstatic energy. The production design is also very impressive, consisting of giant and surreal sets that are colourful and vibrant. But these instances of competence are still outnumbered by a bevy of inarticulate filmmaking blunders. Cats aren’t the only human-animals we see in the film, and the non-felines that aren’t consistently to scale are much scarier. As much as some of the song sequences are shot well and interestingly, others employ utterly bizarre choices, such as jump-cutting to close-ups of Rum Tum Tugger during his song as though it were a party anthem, or repeatedly chopping the last song up so that the movie feels like it has almost as many fake out endings as The Return of the King. The pacing is abysmal in places, particularly in the awkward pauses between numbers (or in a couple cases, within numbers), the tone can get unevenly dark or darkly comic, and many of the films’ shots, lighting choices and compositions almost seem like Hooper intentionally chose the most disturbing take from the rushes.

All of these failures coalesce to produce a movie that is a work of mad genius and genuine madness; a bold and remarkable bounty of confusing creativity and unchecked indulgence; a film going out of its way not to be understood, but rather to be perplexing at every opportunity. An uncompromisingly convoluted, curiously terrifying, pseudo-pornographic, repellent, and beautiful thing of abject weirdness that must be seen! This is a movie where Judi Dench lies in a cat bed and James Corden laps up champagne with his tongue; where cats tap dance in Mickey Mouse pants and one can pull off her skin to reveal a showgirl outfit underneath. Never have I seen a film more ill-suited to its medium so confidently yet futilely attempting to prove otherwise. If Cats doesn’t succeed the way it deserves to at the box office, it is a certain cult hit in the making, of a kind perhaps not seen since The Rocky Horror Picture Show itself.

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