Guess who, again, did not see Little Women this week?
Guess who, instead, ended up vaguely tipsy at a 9pm Sunday screening of Tom Hooper’s Cats?
Let’s jump right in: this film is a deeply intense, psychological experience, and I can only adequately review it via the complex internal journey it took us on. Thus:
The Seven Stages of Watching Cats
1. Abject Horror
This started for me when I saw the first trailer back in July, and then immediately sent it to everyone I knew. Let’s get it out of the way: the ungodly cat-human hybrids do not, at any point, get more pleasant or natural to look at.
Who decided to sun-from-the-Teletubbies this movie? How big are these abominable creatures meant to be?
Why do the cats all have to look so aggressively naked? Especially their sculpted cat bums, the parts where some are wearing clothes and some aren’t, and ESPECIALLY especially when Idris Elba takes his scary coat off to reveal a ripped, furry cathuman body.
2. Gleeful Delight
I watched this film under absolutely perfect circumstances. We were in maybe the smallest theatre I’ve ever seen (about 20 seats) – reflective of the film’s poor performance at the box office, having lost an estimated $90M.
Happily, absolutely everyone in the room was on the same page about the tone of the viewing – in fact, some had seen it already, and were now bringing friends to all share in the spectacle (trauma) together. The energy was similar to that you’d find in screenings of Tommy Wiseau’s The Room, with cheerful heckling and singalongs galore.
I love camp. I love terrible recorder covers of epic soundtracks. I love things that are weird, wonderful, and fail so spectacularly that they begin to succeed again.
And I loved watching some sexy anthropomorphic cats leap around a junkyard whilst singing fun musical theatre tunes. It’s perfectly, horrifically delightful.
3. MORE HORROR, OH GOD, MORE HORROR.
I DON’T LOVE IT WHEN THE CATS ARE WEARING FUR COATS/SKINSUITS, WHICH THEY THEN SEDUCTIVELY REMOVE.
I also don’t appreciate the human shoes and hands on the fluffy bodies.
Jennifer Hudson’s face is absolutely coated in snot for every second that she’s onscreen. At one point, as she tragically crawls away (as a side note, the crawling feels very weird in a universe where the catpeople are clearly bipedal), a string of phlegm very visibly droops from her nose and skydives towards the ground. After a few seconds passed in total silence, I let out an involuntary whimper of “thatwassomuchsnot”. One of the guys in front of us groaned back – “GOD. I was going to just pretend I didn’t see it.”
Cockroaches with human faces. Chubby mouse children who are imprisoned, paraded and consumed by Rebel Wilson. The incredibly sexually charged head nuzzling. Sir Ian McKellen lapping up milk from a bowl.
How did we get here.
4. Tentative Appreciation
After a good half-hour of staring at the horrifying cat-faces and loudly scorning everything that was happened, we gave the shouting a break and gradually settled into a period of calm reflection.
Once you accept that yes, this is happening, it’s hard not to think about how much work went into this audiovisual spectacle. The effects, dodgy and unnerving as they may be, are certainly unlike anything I’ve ever seen. The performers are strong – particularly the ensemble, but even the obligatory stunt cast holds their own. Taylor Swift has revealed that the cast went through “cat camp” training, which is something that I have so many questions about.
More than anything, though, it’s different. I love seeing musicals onscreen, and it’s fun to see one so wild, wacky, and not three hours long.
Mesmerised. Is a word.
5. Mind-Numbing Boredom
How many times is ~Grizabella~ supposed to sing Memory?? Foolishly, I assumed it was one.
One of the crucial problems with Cats is that it is, in the words of one of my fellow movie-goers, really just two hours of cats introducing themselves in song.
I don’t want to say that you can’t make a film with no plot, or that having a traditional story structure is necessary to tell a good story – I’d argue that films like The Breakfast Club (kids do detention and make friends) or Fantasia (colours! sounds! brooms!) are good examples of this. In fact, Hooper actually inserts far more plot than the original production has, creating some semblance of a protagonist in Victoria and adding in a new original song (cough, awardbait, cough) which builds on the themes of the real showstopper, Memory.
But when I checked the clock after meeting Old Deuteronomy – assuming that SURELY we’d now met all the relevant felines – and it wasn’t even halfway to freedom?
I was ready to yeet myself to the Heaviside Layer.
6. In-Depth Theorising
We sat through the credits to talk to our new friends, the-massive-group-of-men-in-front-of-us, as my new best pal the-one-with-glasses explained that there were “two distinct schools of thought on what Cats means”.
I liked theory one, which is that the entire thing is a complex biblical analogy, wherein all the Jellicle cats competing to ascend represent deadly sins – appropriate, in that the Jellicles explicitly describe themselves as “allegorical cats” in a particularly unnerving rhyme.
Theory two was more focused on post-apocalyptic cults, genetic mutation and ritual suicide. I was less convinced by this one, because it doesn’t adequately explain the central role of magic in the “plot”, or how Macavity can disappear with a whirl of glitter whilst sexily hissing his own name.
7. Confused Acceptance
The most surprising takeaway of the night for me? I’m not sure this was the worst way to adapt Cats.
The draw of the musical (which, in all honestly, I have always been deeply skeptical of) is the performance of its cast, but the atmosphere of live performance is difficult to capture on film.
They could have put some talented performers in the classic catsuits and just filmed them being talented, but that approach already exists in the 1998 filmed version – which, incidentally, I was given as a child and absolutely hated.
And while initially I agreed with the case that this should be a full-blown animated film, the show is so dance-heavy and plot-vacant that I can’t imagine it would be nearly as compelling without the visuals of the (sort-of) human performers.
This is a supremely weird film with some incredibly low spots, but it was also the best $8.50 I’ve spent in a while.
3/7 for “is this a good movie?”, 6/7 for “is this a good time?”.
fiftytwofilms 