Friday, January 31, 2020

Notes on a Matinee: CATS (2019)



(110m, Color / Directed by Tom Hooper / Screenplay by Tom Hooper, Lee Hall / Music by Andrew Lloyd Webber, Lyrics by T.S. Eliot, "Memory" lyrics by Eliot, Trevor Nunn, "Beautiful Ghosts" lyrics by Taylor Swift / Starring: Jennifer Hudson, Judi Dench, Taylor Swift, Robbie Fairchild, Jason Derulo, Steven McRae, Rebel Wilson, James Corden, Ian McKellan, Laurie Davidson, Francesca Hayward, Idris Elba


When Cats debuted on Broadway in 1982, after its roaring success in London the year before, it became the hottest ticket in New York. The show was instantly the object of admiration and derision in equal measure. Up to that time, audiences loved Andrew Lloyd Webber's shows indiscriminately (the low-impact failure of Jeeves in 1975 had been his only outright flop) and the 80s were nothing if not all about the excesses of riding a high concept (a whole evening in a cat-sized wonderland). Critics were divided, praising Gillian Lynne's choreography and the cast's commitment, as well as the stunning set/environment designed by John Napier (an oversized junkyard - itself an amalgam of Godspell and Stop the World, I Want to Get Off!), but withholding praise for director Trevor Nunn's all-over-the-place character dictates and the indefensibly flimsy structure of the ostensible plot.

On both stage and screen, Cats is episodic, with the vague idea that these cats come together annually for a ball, and their de facto leader, Old Deuteronomy, announces the one lucky cat who will move on to the "heaviside layer" and ascend into another plane of existence or something. The prize goes to bedraggled alley cat Grizabella, the only obvious candidate. That's it. It's vague to the point of nonexistence, and provides an excuse for a panoply of cats to vie (however obliquely) for the rather dubious privilege of riding a giant rubber tire into the theater's rafters. It's barely there, concept-wise, doing little to conceal the show's genesis as a song cycle derived from T.S. Eliot's book of light verse, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, no doubt all the rage after having been extensively quoted by a deliciously hammy Peter Ustinov in Logan's Run (1976).

Elaine Paige, the British actress who originated the stage role of Evita only to find herself overshadowed by the force that is Patti LuPone, once again found herself eclipsed by her American replacement. Betty Buckley became a sensation with her steely, soaring rendition of the show's anthem, "Memory." Other notable original cast members included Ken Page (best known to modern audiences as the voice of Mr Oogy-Boogy from 1993's The Nightmare Before Christmas), Terrence Mann (who'd earn a Tony nomination as Javert in Les Miserables), and Harry Groener (the Mayor from "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"). The show eventually wore out its welcome with New Yorkers, but kept selling out as a tourist destination show and the object of David Letterman's endless ridicule. Cats earned the ire of "serious" theater folk once it surpassed A Chorus Line as the longest running Broadway show of all time.

From its first success onward, there have been myriad attempts to adapt Cats to film, and the project had remained in development limbo since as early as 1985. This, despite John Guare setting it up as the ne plus ultra of insanely unnecessary adaptations in his dark comedy Six Degrees of Separation (play, 1990).

"Paul," the character of Ouisa Kittredge addresses the play's central con artist in the play. "I'm worried. Is it right to make a movie of Cats?"

"Yes," according to those behind the 2019 film adaptation, who grabbed every British celebrity available (and Jennifer Hudson and Taylor Swift) to assemble this ill-advised live-action version.

The most astounding thing about the film is the apparent complete lack of planning from everyone involved, as if they had a week to pull it together before the drugs wore off or the money dried up.

Costumes are off-the-rack and ill-fitting to the point of distraction -- some of the cats are "nude" and covered in fur (I'll get to that), but many are wearing trousers, jackets, coats, shoes(?!) and hats, all of which seem like they were chosen by firing cast members through a thrift shop out of a cannon.

Sets have been constructed, a la The Incredible Shrinking Woman (1981), slightly oversized to make the "cats" seem cat-sized, but the lack of consistent scaling gives the queasy sensation of being unmoored in some Alice in Wonderland laws of physics. Characters seem to shrink or grow depending on camera placement and what set they're on. Scale is as meaningless in Cats as it is in a Don Bluth animated feature.

Some songs have been pre-recorded, and are performed to playback (and some criminally auto-tuned), while others follow the unwise path director Tom Hooper chose for his milquetoast film adaptation of Les Miserables (2012), recording the songs live.

Let me digress a bit here.

While it's all well and good (and, in fact, should be the only option) to have singers perform live in the theater, it makes absolutely no sense, creatively or practically, to force a singer to sing live while performing for the camera. Not only does it result in less than good sound (and Cats  suffers from hands-down the worst sound design I've ever experienced in a studio-produced musical), it restricts the camera movement and the movement of any other element in the shot, as well as any unseen crew. It also forces the audience to endure at length the copiously overflowing nasal passages of Jennifer Hudson. It may sound like a bold move in a press release, but it actually robs film of its musical property by severely limiting its visual potential.

Film is a visual medium. Theater is a medium of immediacy. They are two distinctly separate things, which is a depressing thing to have to point out in a review.

The soundtrack of Cats is as inconsistent as everything else about the film. Aside from the live-recording issues mentioned above, the sound is so muffled throughout that one begins to wonder if Universal instructed theaters to strap pillows over the speakers-- and then rip them away once Hudson hits the key change in "Memory," where the volume suddenly shoots up several decibels. The overall effect of this is the same has having your ears pop at high altitude, and it is not pleasant, regardless of whether or not you're actually enjoying Hudson's weepy, gasping, snot-soaked rendition of the song . "Beautiful Ghosts," Lloyd Webber and Taylor Swift's new song ("The memories were lost long ago / But at least you have beautiful ghosts" goes the refrain, with nary a rhyme in sight) sits uneasily with the rest of the score, which at least was informed by Eliot's undeniable poetic aptitude.

Most of the musical moments remain intact from the stage show, with the notable removal of both the "Battle of the Pekes and the Pollicles" and "Growltiger's Last Stand," primarily dance moments which would only have further befuddled the film's creative team. As it is, the dance moments of Cats range from nearly exhilarating ("Skimbleshanks the Railway Cat") to infuriating ("The Old Gumbie Cat"), with very little in between. Mostly, the dance moments give you time to check your watch, and, perhaps, your pulse.

Lynne's choreography from the stage, one of the show's few widely praised elements, has been completely eliminated in favor of new dances by Andy Blankenbuehler (Hamilton) whose frenetic groupings and inexplicable reliance on impossible arabesques from the casts' computer-generated tails makes less an impression than does some very awkward wire work inexplicably flown in (pun intended) from a wuxia movie.

Hooper is at sea, along with most of his cast.

Of the pros, only Dench and McKellen escape mostly unscathed, though not before searing our eyeballs with the images of a digitally upstretched leg, in the case of the former, and lapping milk from a saucer, in the case of the latter. One imagines they shared the simultaneous realization that they were a long long way from their magnificent pairing in Trevor Nunn's production of Macbeth at the Royal Shakespeare Company (1976). Francesca Hayward, as audience point-of-view character Victoria, gets a few opportunities to show off her ballet skills (as her feet continually morph from toe shoes to cat toes to human feet with no rhyme or reason). Laurie Davidson's Mr Mistoffelees is more under-served by the production than any, as he seems to be giving the sort of performance the material is best suited for.

James Corden and Rebel Wilson essentially play themselves - bad comedians. Each steamroller through their numbers, fat jokes inflated to vulgar proportions and surrounded by filth (literal garbage in Corden's case, rats and cockroaches in Wilson's) that a more inventive/imaginative director would have made hilarious or at least visually pleasing. Here, it just comes off as repulsive. In keeping with the bizarre "look, it's all people!" aesthetic (if the film can be said to have an aesthetic), the mice and roaches are also played by humans in digitally augmented costume and arbitrarily digitally shrunk to miniature size. Cats is a nightmare inside a fever dream inside a delusion, and don't you forget it.

Steven McRae's Skimbleshanks delivers the film's most rousing song, but the camera never gives him a single close-up or stationary shot of him, so for all I know it could be a series of actors playing the character. Hooper shoots dance sequences as if he's at a sporting event, with none of the careful framing that lets us actually enjoy and appreciate the dancer's movement. Taylor Swift does her best kittycat Moulin Rouge tribute, borne aloft on a catnip-sputtering crescent moon to introduce Idris Elba's Macavity (the ostensible villain of the piece) in alarmingly high pumps (and nothing else).

Which brings us to the film's visual effects, such as they are.

By all rights, Cats should have been an animated feature, whether computer-animated or, better yet, the quickly vanishing 2-D hand-drawn animation of Disney's senior classics. Animation would have suited the musical's plotless and episodic nature far more easily than an attempt to coax an audience into willingly suspending their disbelief that the cavorting humans on the screen are actual felines. And Cats was going to be an animated film until executive producer Steven Spielberg's Amblimation studios closed in the 1990s.

Tom Hooper's involvement began in 2016, and it was his determination that led to Cats being the thing that it is.

The decision to use live actors was always a risky concept, even isolated as they were by the lack of onscreen humans. As film is a literal medium, there was never any chance the audience would "forget" that they were watching people, as many audiences for the stage show claimed to have done. (This is akin to the sort of voluntary ignorance people experience when watching puppetry, for example -- although the unspoken audience/performer agreement with regards to puppetry often remains intact no matter what the medium -- even radio.)

There are only two reasons to make the film in this way: (1) To preserve and celebrate the dance elements of the piece; and (2) to make certain the audience knows which famous person is playing which cat.

Makeup effects have come a long way since Lon Chaney's tortuous virtuosity gave us the original Phantom of the Opera (1925) -- for the very same studio that would bring us Cats-- but makeup effects were eschewed in favor of "digital fur technology," as the press releases crowed.

"Digital Fur Technology" turned out to be digitally mapping the body of each performer and adding a layer of photorealistic "fur" to the actor, along with overly mobile ears and tails. Some people got paws, but as more than one reviewer has pointed out, these come and go with the whims (and overworked schedules) of the digital artists enslaved to apply this asinine treatment.

The post-production period for the film was optimistically short, and other effects houses were enlisted to aid in getting the film ready for release, which resulted in many unfinished shots getting into the final release print (rapidly replaced prints were turned around on the film's very opening weekend). Had the effects been "perfect" they still would have created the same disconcerting effect they had upon the release of Cats' teaser trailer: furry naked people with digitally removed genitalia and tails emerging from where tails typically do not emerge (bluntly, their anuses).

Somehow, a fur-covered naked Idris Elba is more naked than an actually naked Idris Elba would be. The obviously rushed graphic tooling also creates the feeling that someone will be actually naked if they move too fast for the computer to keep up. The illusion is never more than that, because one is constantly aware of its existence, like a weird animated overlay on the film. The artificiality of it ensures its conspicuousness.

Many of the songs do retain their charm, despite zero attempts made to bolster the vocals or even to re-orchestrate the very very 1980s synthesizer-heavy score (Cats was notoriously instrumental in the reduction Broadway orchestra size, resulting in a musician's strike at the time that forced a number of shows to close). The film occasionally gets out of its own way for a moment of clarity between cringes, but such moments are few and far between.

So. Was it right to make a movie of Cats?

Ask me again when they announce a movie of Starlight Express.

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Notes on a Matinee: CATS (2019)

(110m, Color / Directed by Tom Hooper / Screenplay by Tom Hooper, Lee Hall / Music by Andrew Lloyd Webber, Lyrics by T.S. Eliot, "M...