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Cats is a clumsy movie based upon a baffling play whose enduring popularity can be only marginally explained by the somehow popular idea that its composer, Andrew Lloyd Webber, is some kind of genius—an assertion easily countered by paying more than a modicum of attention to any Andrew Lloyd Webber song, which all tend to be both clumsy and baffling in equal measures.
Given the enduring popularity of Cats as a stage production, which at one point held the honor of being the longest running show on Broadway, it was only a matter of time before someone decided to make a movie from it. That much is understandable, though it certainly begs the question of how and why Cats became that popular to begin with.
Seinfeld be damned, Cats is truly a show about nothing. The plot, such as it is, for both the film and the stage production, concerns a gang of cats, alley and house, who gather for their annual meeting to decide which one of them gets to be ritualistically sacrificed so that they might ascend to cat heaven, the Heaviside Layer, to be reborn as a new cat. This, naturally, takes the form of a talent show, where the cats prove their worthiness in the form of song, and perhaps dance.
It is the loosest of frameworks and no attempt has ever been made to make it make sense. Based on a series of children’s poems by TS Elliot, Webber concocted this half-story as a mere excuse to get from one bad song to the next, running what might be the most successful theatrical con this side of Bialystock and Bloom.
In this way, I guess you could call Tom Hooper’s adaptation the most successful adaptation of all time. It has everything that made Cats such a success on Broadway—nonsense songs, inane plot, confusing artistic choices, and even freakishly anthropomorphic felines running wild. It is, unfortunately for us, incredibly faithful to its source material which, by its nature, means it’s bad. Real bad. Just like…so bad.
Hooper’s version offers us the same nightmarish bag of bullshit as Broadway ever did, this time with the distracting addition of poorly rendered CGI, which takes us deep inside an uncanny valley of Eldritch body horror that confounds the senses, confuses logic, and leaves you white-knuckled in terror. Seriously, why they didn’t just give the actors bodysuits as they did on Broadway will go down as the biggest cinematic question mark of 2019. There’s nothing they did with the CGI in this version that they couldn’t have done with half-decent costuming except look as bad as it did here.
If there’s anything positive I can say about Cats, save for the fact that, as it turns out, I’m not actually in Hell which means that it did, eventually, come to an end, it’s that Jennifer Hudson absolutely killed the musical’s signature song, “Memory.” Hudson’s remarkable voice (and perhaps her tragic history) lent a visceral intensity to the song and she made it unequivocally her own. It was a stirring moment in a movie that is woefully lacking in stirring moments. And thankfully she performed it this week on The Voice, so you can experience it without subjecting yourself to the abject nightmare of the film that surrounds it.
All of this said, I guess I can’t discount the phenomenon that Cats was as a portent of its popularity with the average moviegoing crowd. If you liked Cats on Broadway (or on stage at all) then there’s a more than decent chance you’ll like Cats on the big screen. It is a movie made for you, and I’m sure you’ll find something to walk away loving. For the rest of us, however, there are much better and more interesting ways to ruin Christmas than by subjecting your family to whatever the it hell it was Andrew Lloyd Webber thought he was doing when he wrote this ridiculous abomination.
Cats is now playing in theaters everywhere.
