Soundtracking: Cats
Wednesday, January 22, 2020 at 10:00AM by Chris Feil
One month after its catastrophic arrival and its official: Cats has entered the cult pantheon. But unlike the midnight musical tradition set before it by The Rocky Horror Picture Show, this disaster isn’t simply finding an audience that appreciates its merits. If the ultimate schadenfreude response to the film felt pre-baked by the gleefully unhinged reactions to its promotional material, we shouldn’t forget that much of its failed vision falls squarely in the lap of director Tom Hooper.
Cats as a musical is supposed to be earnest, its silly concept a vessel for unbridled imagination from the bombastic funhouse of Andrew Lloyd Webber. Of course, it has always had vocal detractors - it’s still a musical about cats. But for better or worse, it’s a more tuneful score than it’s often credited as, even if it grates...
And Hooper kills the musicality in two crucial ways: he gets in the way of all the things we want from a musical (singing, dancing, spectacle that nevertheless makes sense in our brain) and, even worse, won’t let Cats just be Cats.
His self-seriousness is evident from the jump, with “Jellicle Songs for Jellicle Cats” transformed from a catchy dance spectacle into a dreary mash of wildly disjointed visuals. “Mr. Mistoffelees”, maybe the musical’s most buoyant glittery earworm is instead reimagined as a downtrodden mindfulness exercise to get the magician Jellicle to believe in himself. “Skimbleshanks, The Railway Cat” begins with promise, but is perhaps the most glaring evidence of Hooper’s struggle to capture dance in a compelling way. The one original song, the Taylor Swift cowritten "Beautiful Ghosts", is the most crystalline representation of his vision... because its a dirge.
Musically, Hooper falls back to his old tricks of Live Singing At All Costs as he did with Les Miserables. While this made for some lifeless vocals in that film, here the sound is often at odds with all of the dancing. Surprisingly, this makes a formula for Swift to succeed moreso than her other castmates. Her “Macavity” is unmussed and confident, a vision of what the film could have been if it wasn’t vacillating between too ashamed of itself and too off the rails.
But the live singing hurts no other number more than the one we most anticipate. Tom Hooper wants snot from Jennifer Hudson’s persona-non-Grizabella, and “Memory” never soars as high as it should because of it. He robs us, and the adept Hudson, of the infamous belting refrain that locked Lloyd Webber’s score forever into the annals of history. Luckily, we still have the studio version of the song on the soundtrack to offer us the version where Hudson gets to really belt the number unencumbered.
Perhaps some accidental joy comes from the horror of Judi Dench staring us down in “The Ad-dressing of the Cats”. But this finale shouldn't be a surprise to anyone familiar with the stage version. However, the response to the direct address of the number does reveal the fundamental flaw of Hooper's tinkering. On the stage, the Jellicles basically communicate directly to the audience the whole time; it’s us they’re introducing all these damn cats to. Instead, cynically he adds Francesca Hayward’s Victoria to play an audience surrogate. But after a film’s worth of songs are directed to this newbie among the Jellicle, the conceit gets dropped for the very final number.
And as Dench stares into the camera to remind us the way cats are not dogs, thus a million nightmares are born. It’s not just a bizarre choice, it’s a deeply clunky one - one that not only robs the film of a big finale moment, but one that cements the film in its legacy of insanity. Yet more than the crazy, Cats is defined by its inability to serve its score.
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Reader Comments (9)
I agree and disagree. The music brings the nostalgia, especially to theatre fans who are familiar with the musical, but the "insanity" is exactly what makes this experience a future cult classic. (Note: I call this an experience and not a movie... think of it as the most expensive experimental flop in history.) Everything you mentioned about it being "killed by Hooper's hands" will only fuel its fire, whether Hooper was aware of this intention or not. Audiences will cheer at Hudson's snot, sing along to Mr. Mistofelees' song as they cross paws, applaud at Dench's high kick, go crazy over McKellan's rawr, dance along to Swift's shimmy, and sneer at Corden's opposition against the film (all the while, gleefully confused by the "storyline," which involves a barge and disappearing cats.) We all know this musical should NEVER have been green-lit, let alone for a high budget, but now we're gifted the opportunity to be stimulated by its insanity, as if we're cats chasing a laser pen. And hopefully, if screened correctly... with a little catnip in the system.
You can totally see how Jennifer Hudson keeps thinking "This is my Oscar clip". Nothing works and it's fascinating.
I love "Beautiful Ghosts". It is so self-deprecating.
This will not be in the cult classics ala Showgirls but rather in the pantheons of fiascos like Paint Your Wagon.
i maintain that Dench and McKellen are perfection in this film but the rest is so unthinkable...
Nat, clearly you weren’t high enough. See it again. 😉
I actually love Beautiful Ghosts, it's the one moment in the film I felt worked un-ironically (the lyrics are simple and straightforward, yet very moving and the song helped me build a connection with Victoria that made Francesca Hayward's performance look less flat than it was).
This film is a fascinating failure, and I kind of admire how committed everyone was to an idea that was doomed from the start (starting with the fact that Cats doesn't wors as a screen story!!!). It's a trainwreck, but I would much rather re-watch this over the blandness of any of the Disney live-action remakes.
"Beautiful Ghost" is a good song- they should have gotten Liza to sing "Memory"- it's not a true bad movie musical classic like "Lost Horizon" (1973) just kind of ridiculous and dull- specially bad are the funny bits- and those dancing roaches
I ran right out to see “Cats” to add to my list of Famous Flops that I saw in the theatre, in their first (and sometimes only) week.
I saw one of the stage productions. The dancers all wore costumes the colour of the sets, so it was like camouflage and the dancing was invisible, except for the cat wearing white.
So I was delighted by the dancers in the film, what a great bunch of dancers. I agree, I would have like to have seen those dance sequences shot differently.
The worst part of the film was Jennifer Hudson’s song. They did it so she came across as an immobile column of beautiful sound. Because I don’t really know the song, I couldn’t understand what the words were. I guess it’s a musical choice to value sound over meaning.
And how did that makeup pass the first test? It made her face look immobile, like she only had one expression, a kind of lugubrious lassitude. And the lump of rags they gave her for a costume, just added to the static effect.
I feel sad that none of the fabulous dancers can add this as a credit to their resume.
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