December 2019 will go down in history as the fateful month when theater was found bludgeoned to death, its shimmery innards spilling out in streams of gold. The killer, authorities discovered promptly, was one Tom Hooper, a lackey for Universal Studios. The victim’s bloodstains spelled one word — “Cats.” It was a thorough massacre, plotted over years of production and funded with $95 million.
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The problem is not that “Cats” makes no sense (a plot has been strung together from the incomprehensible stage production) nor that the performances are mediocre (most of them are quite good). The murder weapon is the galling CGI intended to cover the actors in head-to-toe feline fur. Instead, the animation detracts from the film’s capable performers and inventive surroundings, drawing the eye reluctantly in like the sight of a person vomiting in the middle of an amusement park. It makes for a slow death, so overwhelmingly grotesque that it ceases to be interesting at all.
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“Cats” proceeds thusly: a white cat named Victoria (Francesca Hayward) is abandoned in a junkyard and promptly falls in with a gang of London street felines who call themselves the Jellicle cats. They make their way to the Jellicle Ball, where leader Old Deuteronomy (Judi Dench) will decide which of them may be reborn in the Heaviside Layer, but they are occasionally waylaid by wanted criminal Macavity (Idris Elba). The Jellicle cats introduce themselves through song and dance, and Old Deuteronomy decides which of them to kill.
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The Jellicles include, among others, the magical Mr. Mistoffelees (Laurie Davidson), Rum Tum Tugger (Jason Derulo, horny) and the disgraced Grizabella (Jennifer Hudson). The cats and their various occupations are not so important as the spectacle of their performances. Unfortunately, said spectacle is hobbled by CGI work that leaves the Jellicles looking like neither cats nor humans. They have uncanny cat ears sticking out of their human skulls and long tails trailing from their human butts. The women sport furry breasts. Perhaps worst of all, each “cat” retains their distinctly human hands and feet. In wide shots, particularly during Taylor Swift’s jazzy performance of “Macavity: The Mystery Cat,” the animation is so poor as to make its subjects look like medieval paintings, or Jemain Clements in “What We Do in the Shadows.”
The poorly-CGI’d human-cats tap dance on poorly-CGI’d railroad tracks, duet with poorly-CGI’d human-mice, and lift each other’s poorly-CGI’d, genital-and-orifice-free bodies up in fits of ballet. It could be magnificent. Production designer Eve Stewart provides neon-saturated, desolate streets, and cozy homes for the cats to bound through. The ensemble cast is stacked with theater pros like Hayward, Hudson, and Davidson, as well as James Corden, Ian McKellan, and Robbie Fairchild. Hudson gives an astonishingly believable performance (her “Memories” is Anne Hathaway’s “I Dreamed a Dream,” complete with unnecessary close-up), but she is hugely aided by costuming that obscures her cat-body.
Regardless if “Cats” is a good musical or not, it is certainly a successful one, with nearly 7,500 Broadway performances stretching from 1982 to 2000. This is not because “Cats” is a work of unfiltered genius, it is because “Cats” hinges on the spectacle of live performance. The cast interacts with the audience, and its minutes-long dance breaks enthrall up close. The film adaptation, by unnecessarily applying the cinema-only art of CGI to its every pore, denies the audience this magic.
Once Hooper’s 110 minutes of “Cats” are over, theater is dead. One lucky Jellicle cat is dead. And we unchosen ones are left, tragically, to continue living. [F]
