I guess I don’t really know what I wanted Cats (December 20) to be. An adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s thoroughly odd 1981 musical, itself an adaptation of a curious set of children’s poems written by T.S. Eliot, Tom Hooper’s film attempts to do something impossible, something so outlandish that it was the subject of a long joke in John Guare’s play (and subsequent movie) Six Degrees of Separation. Did I want to see someone try to film the unfilmable? And if so, did I want it to be a gamely ridiculous mess, or a surprising triumph?
After seeing Hooper’s film, I’m certainly left with more questions than answers. It’s an existential quandary, this 110-minute journey into a computer graphic phantasmagoria, revolting and briefly alluring, a true grotesque that sings, in fits and starts, a faint siren song. It’s by no means a good movie, and I left the premiere ready to toss an easy critical bomb at it and be done with rotten old 2019. But the more I sat with Cats, or with the, uh, memory of Cats, the more I realized how much I don’t want to outright hate it. It’s an ugly stray who smells bad and should not be invited into your home, certainly. And yet it is its own kind of living creature, worthy of at least some basic compassion.
There are, to be sure, some very talented people involved in the making of the film. An assemblage of actors of varying star profiles try their earnest most (if not best) to breathe life into this misbegotten project, dancing and singing and mugging away as much as physics will allow them. Many of the principals of the film are stage performers, bright-faced young folks like Francesa Hayward, Laurie Davidson, and the two-man dance crew Les Twins (Laurent and Larry Bourgeois). It must have been quite an invitation, to join the cast of this big-budget studio production surrounded by so much chatty speculation. They seize on the opportunity with as much vigor as they’re allowed, giving it their theater-kid best. (Davidson, as the perhaps too magical Mr. Mistoffelees, is a standout.) It’s hard not to root for that kind of glaring energy, devoted though it may be to a doomed endeavor.
The celebrities involved don’t earn as much sympathy. Jennifer Hudson, no stranger to belting her way through a movie role, lands the big notes of “Memory,” even though the film conspires to rob Grizabella of her limelight moment in order to serve the needs of the film’s badly shoehorned-in story. (Cats doesn’t need a narrative, Mr. Hooper.) She looks a fright, too, as do pretty much all of these digitally altered cat-humanoid ghouls. Elsewhere, it’s hard to fault Dame Judi Dench and Sir Ian McKellen for whisper-singing their way through the film; they’ve earned the right. But this movie tries the dignity of even the most venerable of Actor’s Actors.
Slightly less seasoned, but quite well-known, performers like James Corden (Bustopher Jones), Idris Elba (Macavity), Rebel Wilson (Jennyanydots), Jason Derulo (Rum Tum Tugger), and Taylor Swift (sporting a bumbling British accent as Bombalurina) fare even worse, drowning in the movie’s bowl of curdled cream, weighed down as much by preening Event Movie smarm as they are by the movie’s leaden construction. One almost wants to ask them what movie they thought they were making, what spell they imagined was being cast. The answer would probably be a letdown, though, a limp gesture toward the “we’ll fix it in post” era of green-screen filmmaking rather than some convincing actorly justification.