Catsick

The Island of Dr. Lloyd Webber

The negative reviews of Tom Hooper’s film of Cats have been so exhilaratingly funny (“Oh God, my eyes” — Boston Globe) that my main worries about seeing the thing have been 1.) that I’d fall into the lazy critic’s trap of just piling on with fresher insults, or 2.) that it would turn out to be not bad enough to be interesting. Well, I have seen it, and my critical integrity remains unshaken — not because it isn’t bad, or even uninterestingly bad, but because what’s bad about it is, in my view, a bit different than what the critics have obsessed on.

True, the CGI effects are grotesque. I don’t know whether the celebrated “patch” allegedly rushed to theaters to fix issues pertaining to the cat-human hybrids affected my viewing, or even whether that patch exists — I wouldn’t put it past Amblin to try and convince prospective viewers that the film’s problems could be fixed with a little tech tweak so they might ignore the reviews and come back next week.

But there’s not much anyone could do to fix this gruesome experiment. The idea seems to be to make the humans look and move as much like cats as possible — something done on stage by suggestive movement, makeup, and costuming. I assume clever technicians thought that was inadequate for a modern blockbuster, and unconvincing to modern audiences, and tried to improve the cat-effect the way they had improved, for example, cinematic sea battles: By replacing the old miniatures in lucite tanks with digitally calculated graphics, they could make those once-accepted tanks and miniatures look fake, and the animations look real.

In a sense their effort worked too well. The actors’ forms are so enhanced by fake fur, ears, and tails that you indeed question their humanity. But they aren’t quite cats, either. They are, as Bela Lugosi howled in The Island of Lost Souls, “PART MAN, PART BEAST — THINGS!” Eventually the mind adapts and stops inwardly recoiling; nonetheless, something never stops feeling wrong. For example, when the ears on top of their heads move, you never lose awareness that the actor isn’t doing it. And when the actors dance, their movements lack human weight; sometimes they leap dozens of feet and land as if they’ve leapt two, and the effect makes them feel like cartoon characters. Francesca Hayward, a ballerina who plays the lead, does pas de deux and turns and jetés that seem almost normal (they’ve ostentatiously foleyed in the sound of her slippers striking and rubbing the floor, perhaps to enhance this effect), but then you see the other “cats” slinking at superhuman speed along the floor and are reminded that you are in effect watching a turbo-charged rotoscope through which only glimpses of human reality are visible. Maybe someday this will be acceptable to human viewers — like that weird air-ballet in Revenge of the Sith, an art form for a people far removed from our own culture — but for now it just looks hella weird.

And as I said, it’s not really the whole problem. Cats the musical itself is garbage. I had never seen it onstage and was stunned by the ridiculous premise: that the cat-characters about which T.S. Eliot wrote simple, amusing poems were part of some mystical community whose leader chooses one cat every year to ascend to a new life, and in this case Judi Dench picks Jennifer Hudson mainly because she looks and sounds so miserable (the other cats think they can get in by doing the best stage act; if only someone had told them!) and because she sings the one really good song in the show, which does not have lyrics by T.S. Eliot. The music is otherwise mostly awful, the choreography an ugly muddle of cat poses, and the thing is mostly cut neurotically, almost randomly, apparently to distract from the fact that nothing in it makes sense.

On the plus side, the sets, based on a timeless or time-unmoored idea of some central London locales, are a success, and the photography serves the purpose. The actors are not entirely embarrassed; James Corden and Rebel Wilson have some amusing turns, and the ten minutes of Ian McKellen’s over-the-hill actor bit would make an admirable film all by itself. But Hayward’s character is mainly made to gape empathetically or in bewilderment, like a supernumerary in a poorly-directed crowd scene thrust into the lead. And there is no possible reaction to Dame Judi Dench other than How Could You.

Well, I guess I did get pretty catty about it after all. Meow! Ha ha. (No really it sucks.)