Few of us go to work in suits made of human skin, so why would a cat, even a cold cat, wear a fur coat that appears to have been fashioned from more cat? That is one of the many questions arising from “Cats,” Tom Hooper’s latest film. Judi Dench, in the role of a distinguished mouser named Old Deuteronomy, is robed in furs of such richness that even Bette Davis, who was fully minked up for much of “All About Eve,” would have gone into battle to get at them.
“Cats” is based on the stage musical of the same name, which was composed by Andrew Lloyd Webber and ran on Broadway for a hundred and seventy-five years, or something like that. It was adapted from T. S. Eliot’s “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats,” first published eighty years ago. Eliot died in 1965, and is therefore no longer around, sadly, to see Taylor Swift, as a vampish moggy named Bombalurina, sing one of his poems out loud, lolling on a golden crescent moon and sprinkling powdered catnip, like angel dust, as she descends.
Eliot’s book was a series of loosely linked verses, most of them either spoken by or referring to a particular cat. The looseness was not a problem on the page; if anything, it added to the prevailing air, anecdotal and avuncular, of the whole enterprise. Like a volume of nursery rhymes, it had no need of a plot. Movies, on the other hand, are addicted to narrative, and I was eager to learn how Hooper—in collaboration with Lee Hall, who wrote “Billy Elliot,” from 2000, and this year’s “Rocketman”—would bind the characters together. Cats in space, perhaps? Or gangster cats, duking it out for control of the sardine racket?
No such joy. Even after seeing the new film, and even though I am fully aware that it’s grounded in the theatrical version, I’m not entirely sure what happens. But it’s vaguely to do with Old Deuteronomy listening to various cats before making what she calls her Jellicle choice. The upshot is that the elected winner gets to soar away, inside some sort of chandelier-slash-balloon contraption, into the gentle dawn. To what extent this departure signifies death, and, if so, how many times a cat can undergo it (given that nine lives are generally available), is difficult to gauge, but my best guess is as follows: “Cats” is a talent show, and the prize is euthanasia. Hello, kitty!
What is presented to us, in short, is a roster of auditions. We meet a lazy house pet named Jennyanydots (Rebel Wilson); a cockney bruiser named Growltiger, who prowls a barge on the River Thames and who, naturally, is played by Ray Winstone; a former leading lady, Grizabella (Jennifer Hudson), who has fallen on hard and tatty times, and her partner in decrepitude, Gus the Theatre Cat (Ian McKellen); a magician of middling talent, Mr. Mistoffelees (Laurie Davidson); Skimbleshanks (Steven McRae), who tap-dances along a railroad line; and, gazing down upon them with emerald orbs and a lofty snarl, Mr. Macavity (Idris Elba), “the Napoleon of crime.”
I should warn you that not all of the above can hold a tune, though everyone has a crack at it. Nor, with the nimble exception of McRae, do they cut a convincing caper, although that is less of an issue, because the heavy lifting of the dance is performed by a company of experts, who are on slink-and-pounce duty throughout the film. What the stars and the supporting cast have in common is the look—the top-to-tail furriness that, when the first trailer for “Cats” was released, caused millions of prospective viewers to cough up hair balls. With a live audience, the only option for a convincing cat is a judicious blend of costumes and makeup; at the cinema, a host of other tricks comes into play, and what swathes the protagonists of Hooper’s movie is not the strokable, washable, combable stuff that you find on the average tabby but “digital fur technology.” Welcome to the world of pixelated pelts.
How to respond to such a spectacle? Will you be amazed, bemused, allergic, or agog? Many people, I suspect, will lean forward in their seats, peer at the peculiar creatures that romp around onscreen, and ask, “What in God’s creation are they? If they’re talking cats, why do they have normal hands? If they’re men and women, how come they fit through a cat flap?” The hitch with trying to straddle the animal and the human is that you can easily lose your footing and slip through the chasm between them, and the risk becomes acute, in the movie, when Hooper decides to present us with stripping cats. I’m not kidding. It’s awkward enough to watch Elba peel off his outerwear and bust some pantherine moves, giving the simultaneous impression of being extremely naked and not really naked at all, but he is decorum personified when compared with Wilson, as Jennyanydots. She suddenly unzips her fur to disclose her inner cat, who is sporting a skimpy dress. What? Are there more cats stacked inside her, like cozy Russian dolls, and, if so, how many? Where does the outfit end and the beast begin?
A few of the actors, to be fair, inspect the demands of this curious movie and meet them in style. McKellen is nicely restrained in the part of a crotchety ham who cannot resist the temptation to tread the boards once more. “Touch wood,” he murmurs, for luck, as he prepares to make his entrance, rubbing his muzzle against a beam. Then, there is Francesca Hayward, a principal dancer at the Royal Ballet, in London, who makes her screen début in “Cats,” as a sleek and silvery ingénue named Victoria, and walks—or calmly waltzes—away with the show. Like Cyd Charisse, Hayward is neither an actress nor a singer by training, yet her lyrical instincts fend off the menace of kitsch, and her motions, across the frame, lend her a grace that the more seasoned performers struggle to achieve. Here and there, that physical ease is blurred by computerized artifice, but no matter; we believe in her felinity.
A confession: I have never seen “Cats” onstage, or listened to it, or had anything to do with it. This was not negligence on my part but a conscious decision, taken out of loyalty to T. S. Eliot. It was also, I now realize, a wise precaution. Without wishing to impugn the professional skills of Lloyd Webber, still less the taste of his innumerable fans, how on earth did he manage to turn a suave and witty bundle of light verse into such a clumpy heap of kitty litter? Poem after poem is traduced, the bounce and sway of Eliot’s rhythms trimmed to a hasty hobble, and, for some reason, the dramatis personae—in the film, at any rate—end up less sharply etched in the mind than they did when they consisted of nothing but words.
Admirers, I’m sure, will protest and point to “Memory,” the one certified show-stopper, as proof of Lloyd Webber’s way (so cunningly stirring) with a tune. Hooper duly treats it with the same awed respect that he accorded to “I Dreamed a Dream” in his movie “Les Misérables,” from 2012. Hudson, whose lung capacity may well exceed that of all her colleagues combined, delivers “Memory” in a sob-moistened closeup, and, as with Anne Hathaway in the earlier film, I wasn’t sure whether to applaud or to reach out and proffer a handkerchief. Meanwhile, for the first time, I attended to the lyrics of the song and understood, to my horror, precisely what level of damage it inflicts on poor old Eliot. It sweeps up offcuts of his early work, including “Preludes” (“Burnt-out ends of smoky days”) and “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” (the dank rhyme of “mutters” and “gutters”), and has the temerity to transmute those desolate moments into the purest mush: “If you touch me, you’ll understand what happiness is, / Look, a new day has begun.”
Give me a break. This is T. S. Eliot, for heaven’s sake, not a production of “Hair,” although the visual-effects department might well disagree. Nor does the spoliation stop there. One cat, we are informed, dwells in “the Waste Land,” and, most bewildering of all, Dench, as Old Deuteronomy, leans wistfully against a windowsill and, without warning, launches into a long quotation, sung in solemn recitative, from “The Dry Salvages,” the third of Eliot’s “Four Quartets.” (“We had the experience but missed the meaning, / And approach to the meaning restores the experience,” and so forth.) Few verse-speakers are as eloquent as Dame Judi, and no one is better equipped to convey the difficult beauty of Eliot’s lines, but somehow—call me picky—they lose a good deal of their force when recited by a kind of luxury Garfield.
All of which leaves one wondering, What is this movie for? And to whom is it aimed? Eliot, it’s true, voiced similar concerns when sending an early draft of what would become “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats” to his publisher, in 1936. With his habitual—if somewhat frightening—clarity and honesty, he foresaw the likely pitfalls that awaited. “There are several ways in which this might be a failure,” he wrote, and added, “There might be a part that children wouldn’t like and part that adults wouldn’t like and part that nobody would like. The mise-en-scène may not please. There seem to be many more ways of going wrong than going right.”
Indeed. In the event, his poems have retained their charm and memorability; it is the film of “Cats” that tumbles headlong into the traps that Eliot feared. Parents will sit seething in the dark and count the ways in which they could have spent their afternoon instead of watching James Corden plunge into a giant vat of garbage, while their baffled offspring will frown at “Four Quartets” and take the opportunity to run to the toilet. The screening I went to was family-packed, and it was only by a supreme effort of will that I refused an offer of free face-painting, but I dread to think how the harmony of those families will have been shattered by the scenes with Wilson. Near the start, she lies on her back, spreads her hind paws, and scratches her inner thighs in our direction. This display may be intended for comic emphasis, but, if you have little kids with you, get ready to cover their eyes.
The problem, put simply, is not that Hooper’s “Cats” is every bit as weird as rumor suggested. The problem is that it’s not quite weird enough. You want a British director, proper ballerinas, lusty singing, and a flood of surreal designs? Try “The Tales of Hoffmann,” made in 1951, by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. The editing of that film, and the blinding intensity of its colors, can still shock an audience, even now, and you emerge from it as from a dazzling dream. “Cats,” by contrast, for all the energy of its contributors—despite the twitch of their ears, and the stiffening of their tails—fails to sink its claws into our imagination. It has the look, but not the leap. It approaches a genuine strangeness, takes a sniff, then creeps away, curls up in its basket, and goes to sleep.
