Cats: Reality, Unreality, Surreality?
Or,
Please Don’t Watch This Movie If You’re having a Psychotic Break

I’ve got to hand it to Andrew Lloyd Webber. For almost 40 years, he’s had us convinced that Cats is a master musical. In point of fact, it has about three good songs, plus a lot of filler to move the limited plot along. This is down to my personal taste of course, and I’m sure super-fans will disagree, but that’s where Cats the movie has left me. My opinion was not helped by the decision to have most of the cast sort of whisper-talk their songs, an artistic choice which also marred Les Misérables, only it’s worse here. Will Tom Hooper ever let his cast actually sing the songs, or are we stuck with this actor-y verité affectation forever? I do realize it’s intended to be a recitative musical, but when it came to the songs themselves, it left me, a person with little familiarity with the score, mostly unable to follow the music.

As the film opens, we are introduced to the audience stand-in, Victoria the kitten. A shadowy human woman gets out of a 1940s car, angrily throws a wriggling sack into a night-time alley, and drives away. Dark! Then a shift occurs, and from the sack emerges the human-sized ballerina Francesca Hayward. We get an intro where the cats all sniff out the newcomer and we are told about “jellicle” cats in great, somewhat repetitious detail (eat 1 (one) piece of popcorn every time the word “jellicle” is uttered). Then we move on to the stories of Jellyanydots (Rebel Wilson) and Bustopher Jones (James Corden), set pieces that struck me as being essentially a 20-minute-long fat joke. And I do mean long. I wasn’t even offended necessarily, just bored; that’s how charmless it was. As a side note, if you decide to drop acid before watching this movie, you will deeply regret it. The Jellyanydots scene features Rebel Wilson and the other human-cats singing and dancing along with a chorus line of singing cockroaches (similarly humans in CGI’d costumes) and then they eat the cockroaches. They eat several of the cockroaches. While the rest of the cockroaches keep dancing.

I feel like Lloyd Webber can be forgiven for his original idea — professional human dancers do move in the lithe, impressive ways that actual cats do — it’s a metaphor I’m happy to run with. But I suspect that with the stage show’s entirely practical effects, the falseness, the theater of it, was something the audience and the actors were creating jointly. At least I hope the stage audiences never had to think too hard about “is this a person? or is it a cat? or a gods-forsaken human-cat hybrid?” Put fuzzy ears and face paint on a stage actor and everyone’s a fan. Put computer-generated fur on the same characters and it starts to melt your little primate brain. Also on this point: absolutely everything in this movie feels fake and weightless, with characters flying soundlessly through the air in some scenes; but when dancers leap, the sound of their feet hitting the boards is strikingly loud. Now of course dancers landing is a sound I expect to hear in stage shows, but I didn’t expect it here. It’s just symptomatic of the whole weird set of decisions. To muddy things further, the magical rules of this world seem inconsistent. Macavity (Idris Elba) is the bad guy — er, bad cat — and he can literally do magic, but Mr. Mistoffelees’ magic seems only to work when all the other cats sing his song back to him. And what the hell is a jellicle cat? For a minute I thought I had worked out that a jellicle cat was a cat without a human, but since several of the cats have collars and seem to live in human spaces some of the time, I realized that wasn’t quite right either. So a jellicle cat is a cat and . . . let’s just leave it at that.

Ultimately Cats doesn’t fail on its plot or lack thereof. I think it falls apart on this question of falseness versus realness, and what it is exactly the filmmaker expects from the audience, and where we are allowed to insert our own imaginative work into the story-telling endeavor. All cinema (and all storytelling art) hinges on a mutually agreed-upon suspension of disbelief. But Cats can’t decide what it wants us to believe – are the cats actual cats, with actual fur? or are they metaphors for cats? or are they metaphors for people? They could be several of those! But whereas the stage productions trusted the audience in fill in the edges with their own imagination, the inconsistent use of computer-assisted cinema magic makes me think Tom Hooper does not trust his audience. And that’s why you get people obsessing over what Judi Dench’s hands look like, or Rebel Wilson unzipping her cat skin to reveal a chorus girl outfit in sparkly cat-skin beneath. It’s not only freaky and unsettling; it’s a world apparently functioning under its own set of rules which none of us are allowed to know. It doesn’t trust us to take a little costuming magic and construct our own inner version of the Cats world. The tagline for this film is “You will believe,” but I’m pretty sure the failure of belief isn’t just with us.

Now I’ve got to say something nice, and here it is: some of the performances are compelling. Frankie Hayward is such a shining creature; I felt like she lit up everything around her. Laurie Davidson and Robbie Fairchild were very affecting as Mr. Mistoffelees and Munkustrap. The professional dancers are in their element here, and can survive the things that are done to them via CGI. But people like Taylor Swift, whose main job doesn’t involve this kind of full-body physicality, looked so awkward I just kind of winced. (And this has nothing to do with body types, by the way — I actually thought Rebel Wilson came off better than Swift.) As a side note, Taylor Swift should really be embarrassed, because Hayward’s singing outdid hers by a mile. Oops.

Our Drunk Monkeys EIC Kolleen remarked to me, “Imagine ending the decade like this!” It’s true. Like Cats, life in this historical moment is a Boschian hellscape, punctuated by absurd moments of beauty. If life is a musical, it’s definitely the kind with no plot and a lot of irritating characters, and mostly we sing it badly. And yet we still hope. We still go out in the world, looking for magic, not necessarily expecting to find it but giddy when we do. As a culture, we’re so in love with what technology can do, and we embrace it; but art can’t be about the tool used to make the art; it has to be about something else, something ineffable and inexplicable, something like . . . the heaviside layer. HAR. Cats may not be the kind of movie magic we want right now, but it’s probably the kind we deserve.

Jeanne Obbard is a poetry reader for Drunk Monkeys whose work has appeared in Gingerbread House, Glass, andFive2One. She enjoys botanical gardens, long walks on the beach, and being contrary. She has a blog but has forgotten the password so it’s probably being used to disseminate Russian kompromat now. Safer to find her on Twitter where her very imaginative handle is @JeanneObbard.