There are generally two types of successful stage musicals: the crowd-pleasers accessible to a wide audience and the weird cult hits that appeal to a niche crowd. It's what makes the whole Cats phenomenon such a unique exception to the rule. Andrew Lloyd Webber's whimsical '80s Broadway megamusical is based on equally fanciful source material (T.S. Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats poetry collection), has little actual plot, and is known for its polarizing aesthetic and framework. Add similarly divisive director Tom Hooper - the filmmaker who shot much of his Best Picture winning period drama The King's Speech like an episode of Mr. Robot - to the mix and you've got the perfect recipe for a marvelously bonkers movie adaptation. Cats brings Webber's Broadway sensation to life as an audaciously bizarre spectacle sure to delight and divide as much as the original musical does.
What plot there is boils down to this: one night, a naive young cat named Victoria (Royal Ballet dancer Francesca Hayward) is abandoned in a back-alley, bringing her face to face with the members of the Jellicle cat tribe. Turns out, tonight is the night of the Jellicle Ball, an event in which the wise and elderly Old Deuteronomy (Judi Dench) will make "the Jellicle choice" and decide which of them is worthy of ascending to the Heaviside Layer and returning to a new life. But as the various Jellicle cats prepare for the night's festivities, the cunning and magically powered Macavity (Idris Elba) conspires to take out his competition.
Those familiar with the Broadway musical know Cats is a proper litmus test for just how much one loves the art of musical theater in and of itself, and the movie version is no different. If anything, Hooper and his co-writer Lee Hall (Rocketman) lean into the show's weirdness and double down on it with their adaptation. This is a film where cats wear fur coats (because of course they would), Rebel Wilson's pampered Jennyanydots cat performs a Busby Berkeley-style dance number with other creatures that have human faces (you read that correctly), and Taylor Swift's flirtatious Bombalurina shows up to get everyone high on catnip before clearing out after a single scene (fair warning: these cats are more than a little horny). Anyone who's down for this brand of madness should mostly find themselves swept up into Cats' fantastically demented voyage, powered by the sheer catchiness of Webber's distinctly off-beat '80s tunes, all of which have their charms. Bless them, the cast is just as committed to this lunacy as their director, and there's nary a trace of self-awareness as they bat, hiss, nuzzle, or toss cat-puns at one another.
Like the stage show, Cats has a basic message (kindness and acceptance are good, tribalism and self-serving behavior are bad), and its story is a secondary concern to its craftsmanship. For the movie, Hooper made the bold choice to transform his cast into very weird-looking humanoid cats the size of actual felines (with practical sets constructed to scale) using so-called "digital fur technology". But as easy as the CGI trickery is to mock, it has the desired effect, allowing Cats to transport audiences to a world that feels as far removed from reality as possible, despite it being (austensibly) set in England. If Hooper went too far with the naturalism in his Les Misérables musical adpatation, he goes to the opposite extreme here, and for good reason. There's nothing even remotely "real" about this setting, so the artifice of the cast's appearances only adds to the fever dream-quality of the whole thing. And because there's so much beautifully balletic dance choreography to capture (in addition to Eve Stewart's splendid production design), Hooper and his DP Christopher Ross are forced to shoot most of the film in fluid, wide-angle camera shots without going overboard on the closeups a la Les Mis.
In spite of its shoddy sound design (Hooper, as he did with Les Mis, has his cast sing live, but their vocals are poorly blended with the instrumentation), Cats perfectly matches its actors to their respective roles. Though Hayward doesn't hale from an acting background, Victoria is characterized more through dance and song (her solo tune, "Beautiful Ghosts", was written for the film by Swift and Webber, and if you didn't know better, you would think it was part of the original stage show), allowing the ballerina to shine as the feline ingénue. Wilson, Swift, James Corden (as Bustopher Jones, a cat who loves being fat), and Jason Derulo (as the "hip" Rum Tum Tugger) similarly bring their musical talents to the table, giving each of their big numbers a distinctive sound and genre vibe. Dench and Ian McKellen (as Gus, the revered old theatre cat) take more of a sing-speak approach to their tunes, but the pair are warm and affectionate, and gender-swapping Deuteronomy turns out to be a move for the better. And though Elba is strangely charismatic as the conniving Macavity, the standout supporting cat-player is easily Jennifer Hudson as the lonely and decrepit Grizabella; her powerhouse rendition of the moving "Memory" is one to remember.
Perhaps more than any other film released this year, Cats is a movie you can fairly judge by its marketing. If watching the movie's trailers left you with little to absolutely no desire to see the whole thing, then it's safe to assume Cats won't be your cup of tea. But if the previews left you excited to find out just how ridiculous Hooper's film adaptation truly is - and/or you're a fan of the original Broadway megamusical who's hoping the big screen version captures its inspired eccentricity in cinematic form - then Cats is very much worth a look in theaters. Who knows: this may yet go down as the masterpiece of musical madness Hooper had inside him all along.
Cats begins playing in U.S. theaters on Thursday evening, December 19. It is 109 minutes long and is rated PG for some rude and suggestive humor.
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