Please wipe this movie from my “Memory.”
That would be “Cats,” Andrew Lloyd Webber’s hit Broadway musical-turned-screen-litter box. The film has been a source of freak-show fascination all year long, from the cuckoo casting announcements — Judi Dench and Taylor Swift! — to the creepy CGI fur. But weirdness isn’t the issue here. “Cats,” which is based on T.S. Eliot’s poetry collection “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats,” ran on Broadway successfully for 18 years, and nobody ever went in expecting something traditional.
Director Tom Hooper’s movie is a huge failure because he’s completely abandoned the fundamentals of what made “Cats” a terrific show: sublime music, captivating dance and an intoxicating atmosphere. Instead, the director chooses to shake the camera around as though he can’t find his footing, uses dreadful CGI-human hybrids that look worse than makeup and needlessly buttresses the plot with exposition.
Yeah, Tom, let’s really focus on the plot of “Cats.”
Woefully watch as Hooper and writer Lee Hall throw in a frame story in which a kitten, Victoria (Francesca Hayward), is abandoned in an alleyway — Merry Christmas! — and gets inaugurated into the Jellicle tribe. In case the audience gets lost during what’s essentially a song contest, they include an explainer from Robbie Fairchild’s Munkustrap: “Come see a cat who is competing to be the Jellicle choice!” To give Idris Elba more to do, his villainous Macavity now skulks around catnapping all the film’s A-list stars, abandoning them on a barge in the Thames. (I suspect this is also because the studio couldn’t get James Corden, Jason Derulo and Rebel Wilson to do the ensemble dances.)
Hooper, who also wrecked “Les Misérables” with his indulgences, brings back what’s become his signature: live singing. The tracks are not prerecorded to guarantee the actors sound, you know, good, but rather are sung au naturel as the scene is being filmed. Remember Anne Hathaway’s weepy haircut in “Miz”? Well, the actors in “Cats” — save for Swift as Bombalurina and Jason Derulo as the Rum Tum Tugger — are barely passable, with wobbly voices that struggle to stand out or blend. Oscar winner Jennifer Hudson awkwardly sobs through the musical’s most famous song, “Memory,” and shockingly can’t comfortably hit the notes.
The script, such as it is, has been tinkered with by the filmmakers, and you don’t have to be a scholar to spot their schlock. For instance, I highly doubt Nobel Prize winner Eliot wrote such lines as “Do you think he just got neutered? Because those notes are high!” and “Oh no, look what the cat dragged in.”
A word about the dancing. Original choreographer Gillian Lynne died last year, but left an indelible mark with musicals such as “Cats” and “Phantom of the Opera.” Her choreography for this show was a perfect mix of animalism, ballet and modern movement. But much of it has been jettisoned for Andy Blankenbuehler’s (“Hamilton”) more organic street dancing. It’s not only a shame that Lynne’s famous work wasn’t immortalized on-screen, but Blankenbuehler’s new moves are a snooze. He turns “The Jellicle Ball” from a showstopper to a watch-checker.
Over the years, Lloyd Webber has had a string of film clunkers, including “Evita” (Madonna, ugh) and “Phantom of the Opera” (Gerard Butler, ugh). “Cats” and Hudson easily make the ugh list, if not the upcoming Oscar nominations. But there are three worthwhile aspects of this movie, all actors giving it everything they’ve got. They would be legends Dench and Ian McKellen, naturally, but also a little-known 27-year-old charmer named Laurie Davidson, who plays Mr. Mistoffelees.
In the first song of the musical, a tribe of felines sing, “Jellicles can and Jellicles do.” Hooper’s film prompts the question: Should they?