"Cat"-astrophic Case File #153 Cats (2019)
Bad movies are kind of my thing. For the last THIRTEEN years I have celebrated and eviscerated the greatest and worst and craziest failures of all time online, first with My Year of Flops in the bygone days of 2007, when a gentle soul with an artistic bent named George W. Bush united a nation with his compassionate conservatism and Wild Hogs taught us all how to laugh again, and later as My World of Flops.
I don’t want to brag, but this column, as well as the steep downward trajectory of my career and finances have made me synonymous with failure. But ever since the first Cats trailers were released to universal disdain and delicious mockery the whole goddamn world has gotten into the business of making fun of bad movies.
Actress Evan Rachel Wood made headlines for SHARING HER REACTION TO THE FILM ON SOCIAL MEDIA when a schadenfreude-happy press decided to make a big story of the 13 star Tweeting “#cats is actually worse than I thought it would be, And I already thought it would be horrible. But….I am actually speechless. Why would you change the choreography? I…am SPEECHLESS. It’s not the cast’s fault. Its…maybe the worst thing I have ever seen. Ever.”
One social media platform didn’t provide Wood a large enough outlet to express her disdain for the ill-fated adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s smash Broadway musical so she took to Instagram to further complain, “I have to have an actual live reaction of this. What the f—k! What the f—k! What the f—k!”
Wood is not the only one making catty comments about the flop of the year, if not the decade. Grannies, garbageman, vicars: everyone in the world is straight up dunking on Cats.
Film critics, historically the most reviled profession, narrowly beating out kiddie snuff film producers, have unexpectedly won the public’s heart with their verbose, loving, vicious and venomous take-downs of this humiliation for the ages.
Even James Corden, easily one of the most excessively cast performers in pop culture, got in on the action, saying that he hadn’t seen it despite appearing in it, but that he’d heard bad things.
Hell, my sixteen month old son Harris recently spoke his first words, and let me tell you something, my boy roasted Cats something fierce. Takes after dear old dad. Hasn’t even seen the film, nor does he even understand the concept of movies but there’s just something in the air that leads even the most innocent of us to want to cruelly mock Tom Hooper’s furry musical abomination.
Hooper has taken one of the most commercially successful musicals of all time, a tacky spectacle that entertained tourists for decades and transformed it into the craziest, trippiest cult movie of 2019 this side of The Fanatic.
Cats reminded me of Roberto Benigni’s similarly mesmerizing Pinocchio, another failure for the ages that owes its misbegotten existence to extraordinary success. In Benigni’s case that extraordinary success was Life is Beautiful. With Cats, it’s an intellectual property (and I use the word “intellectual” very lightly here) whose commercial bona fides have been proven by record-breaking runs in the United States and abroad.
The key distinction is that Cats proved itself as a theatrical endeavor. Movies are a whole different ballgame. The fatal flaws at the heart of Benigni’s Pinocchio and Cats should have been screamingly apparent immediately. The moment the filmmakers saw what Benigni looked like as a 46-year old, balding wooden child in a waking nightmare distinguished primarily by its ghoulishness and unrelenting homoeroticism they should have pulled the plug.
On a similar note, when they did the CGI tests and witnessed with their own eyes what the cast looked like in Cronenbergian part-human, part feline form they should have not just ended production but ritualistically burned all of that footage in a purifying fire as a sacred ritual of death and renewal. Then they should have burned down the building where the footage was screened just to be safe.
You would imagine that watching Cats the human brain would do what it tends to do when confronted by the bizarre, the inexplicable, the deeply wrong and impossible to believe: stop fighting and buy into a crazed monstrosity’s preposterous fake-reality for the sake of maintaining sanity. That does not happen here. Cat is somehow even harder to believe and buy into at the end than it is at the beginning.
As a theatrical production, Cats not only benefitted from, but depended upon the physicality and proximity of live performance. Audiences had no choice, really, but to believe in the reality of the production because these cursed creatures were right in front of them, sweating and dancing and emoting as big as life.
In theaters, the actors playing the cats are right the in the audience’s laps, twisting and contorting as they grind their bottoms into groins in a filthy burlesque of feverish intercourse, writhing sensually in hopes of a generous tip. Now, I have not seen Cats in its theatrical form but based on the overwhelmingly, bizarrely inappropriate sexuality of its theatrical adaptation I have to assume that at some point the entire audience receives lap-dances from the cast.
Cats is equally unsuccessful as a Broadway musical and as a 100 million dollar recruitment commercial for furries that forces audiences to spend two solid hours contemplating the sensual grace of the cat world. The understandable if confusing and somewhat alarming absence of genitalia among these disturbingly anthropomorphic abominations similarly forces our poor, overwhelmed, perpetually assaulted senses to contemplate how the hell these creatures reproduce and express their feverish sexual urges.
The cognitive dissonance never stops with Cats. Our collective brain stubbornly refuses to play along. That unanswerable howl of “What the fuck is this shit?”, “Why?” and “How?” only grows stronger and stronger, to the point where three days after having seen the infamous flop at a scarcely-attended Christmas showing accompanied by my cat-phobic wife I am still wrestling with those questions and many others.
Structurally Cats reminds me of a Christopher Guest movie, where we are introduced to a broad cross-section of oddballs and eccentrics en route to a climactic competition or performance. In this case we experience the acid trip unreality through the experiences of Victoria (newcomer Francesca Hayward), a kitten who is abandoned by her owners and set loose in a magical nightmare world of Jellicle Cats all competing for a chance to be the chosen one at the Jellicle Ball where a God-like figure known as Old Deuteronomy (Judi Dench) will grant one lucky cat an opportunity to ascend to Heaviside layer, a paradise in the sky where they will be purged of their sins and reborn.
The characters in Cats never stop introducing themselves and explaining who they are and what they do. Yet that did not stop me from continually wondering, “Who the hell are all these weirdoes and what is their deal?”
We explore the world of Cats through the innocent, uncomprehending eyes of Victoria as she tries to steer clear of Macavity, a VERY bad kitty of almost Satanic evil that Idris Elba manages to invest with genuine menace despite the rampaging silliness of everything around him, and is moved by the broken-down grace of Macavity’s ex-girlfriend, Grizabella (Jennifer Hudson).
In a movie largely otherwise devoid of human emotion, and humanity, possibly because it’s about fucking cats, Jennifer Hudson’s powerhouse rendition of “Memory” is a legitimate tear-jerker, a shameless, heart-wrenching meditation of nostalgia and mortality and aging and the eternal sinister whisper of the grave that Hudson absolutely nails the way she did the similarly raw, similarly shatteringly powerful performances that won her the Academy Award for Dreamgirls.
“Memory” fucking kills. For a brief, magical moment, Cats has a legitimate claim on our hearts and our souls. We get a glimpse at what might have been if everything had not gone flamboyantly, spectacularly wrong and Cats realized its creative as well as commercial potential as the long-in-the-works cinematic realization of one of the most successful and venerable pieces of entertainment of the past fifty years.
Then we go back to the bad jokes, head-spinningly bizarre and wrong production numbers and a screenplay so jokey, glib and tonally wrong that it feel like they flew in Bruce Vilanch at the last minute to pinch-hit a bunch of dumb, punny one-liners winkingly acknowledging the stupidity and ridiculousness of the film’s premise in a way that ever so slightly undercuts its very serious concerns involving aging and morality and the universal longing for transcendence and rebirth.
According to Wikipedia, Cats was the fourth longest running show in Broadway history and the sixth in the entirety of the West End. Yet it has been realized on film in a manner that make it seem astonishing and highly unlikely that audiences could have enjoyed this material on anything but a deeply ironic level, that anyone could have endured this nonsense without pondering, for example, what the hell happened to all the people.
Were they all raptured? Did they die en masse in a nuclear war? Did they all die en route to their home planets? Or is this a planet without people, yet everything is people-sized and seems to have just about everything in our world except, you know, human beings? Cats could have conceivably answered some of these questions with an opening crawl like Star Wars, only ten times longer, explaining at least some of what the fuck is going on. Cats chooses not to do that. Why gently condition your audience to accept increasing levels of craziness when you can just throw them into the deep end immediately and hope to hell they know how to stay afloat in a world that no longer makes sense or has rules, that God has clearly abandoned?
Cats doesn’t even have any opening credits! How insane is that? If ever a movie needed to give people a little time to get acclimated to the historic shit show they’re not just about to watch but to experience it’s the film version of Cats. Yet Hooper, in a characteristically astonishing miscalculation, perversely decided to forego even the requisite soft opener of at least letting us know who is responsible for the pain and weird pleasure we’re about to experience, to give us time to take our coat off and get settled in. Why would they do that when they can just throw us in a vat of cinematic lysergic acid, in a movie that asks us, with deeply unbecoming urgency if its CGI kitty cat version of Taylor Swift, with disconcertingly large human breasts but no nipples is making us realize something new and surprising about our sexuality?
So many questions. So few answers. Cats has a tone that somehow manages to be G rated and family friendly and X rated and relentlessly dirty at the same time as well as a sense of perspective that changes wildly from scene to scene in a way that’s more disorienting and unsettling than the impossible geography of The Shining.
Wandering out of Cats I was torn between a Fiasco and Secret Success rating. There’s seemingly no denying that Cats is a fiasco in every sense of the word but I don’t necessarily deem movies Secret Successes because they’re good. No, I sometimes give out the Secret Success to movies that make a deep, indelible impression on me, that freak me out and blow my mind and do a number on my psyche.
Like this one
That’s Cats. It’s a star-studded cinematic extravaganza with the tacky, glittery soul of The Apple.
The fact that I can’t stop thinking about Cats, and plan to buy the soundtrack, and nurse vague plans to see it again tips it firmly into the “Secret Success” category, with the caveat that this is the secretest of successes and the biggest and most public of failures.
I don’t think I’ve ever had a film-going experience quite like Cats, and yes, I was on a very small amount of psychedelic mushrooms when I saw it. That’s probably a good thing but I am grateful that Cats exists in violent defiance of God’s will and the wishes of the international moviegoing public all the same.
It’s rare for a movie to make such a bold and big claim on bad-movie immortality right out of the gate but Cats lives up and down to the hype. It’s no bad movie: it’s a goddamn experience, one I’m still very actively processing nearly a week later.
Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Secret Success
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