255. Cats

Song - Memory (Barbra Streisand)

Movie: Cats (Tom Hooper, 2019)

Definitely not one of the worst films ever made, which is a bit of a dissapointment. I was secretly hoping for a spectacularly unique misfire, but it's just a bunch of actors in CGI cat costumes on CGI sets twirling to random mediocre musical theatre. The CGI sets make London look drab and anonymous, but that's what you get from the average contemporay effects-driven Hollywood blockbuster, whose CGI robs all locations from any sort of character. The CGI 'costumes' are mostly dumb, as rather than making the characters look and behave like actual cats, they make them look and behave like humans badly pretending to be cats. Interestingly, the cat-like features of a character seem inversely proportional to the fame of their actors; Judi Dench, Ian McKellen, Taylor Swift and Idris Elba look much more like themselves than the other 'cats'. That's better for Swift and Elba, the only people in the film who perform with some spunk and personality and manage to evoke something else than wide-eyed reverence, than it is for McKellen and Dench. They are no great singers and also too old to waste their acting talents like this; there are fewer sights in contemporary film sadder than a skittish (barely disguised) McKellen licking milk from a plate, but the scenes of Dench sprawled out on a sofa like a smutty cat come close. Dench recently showed that at the age of 89 she is still capable of reciting Shakespeare sonnets on the spot. Here she brings the same gravity to lines like "So first your memory I'll jog, and say a cat is not a dog".

I had little clue of what Cats was about before seeing this, and was surprised that it's sort of the silliest riff on Greek mythology imaginable. There is a railway cat, a theater cat, a magician cat,  a cat of the underworld, a fat cat, all taking part in a singing competition, judged by Old Deuteronomy (Judi Dench) who will decide which cat gets to ascend to cat heaven. Each cat sings a song about itself, showcasing its particular characteristics and traits, how it is more mythical than humans imagine and how it affects the human world in ways that we take for granted. Unsurprisingly, a quick (this is definitely a rabbit hole I don't want to disappear in) Google search shows that there is a lot of Cats fan fiction being created, and you can easily imagine that a more cynical version of Andrew Lloyd Webber would have created a whole Cats universe out of his smash hit. Him not doing that does make the whole thing somewhat more interesting, turning this essentially into an origin story without follow up. It's transparently ridiculous nonsense that doesn't strain to find any higher meaning, social commentary or deep subtext, yet is performed with gravely earnest seriousness. If we can see the art in lighthearted comedy about dark subjects, then surely the opposite could, when done well, also have some value?

I would have liked it more if the songs were a bit better, but they are quite monotonous (as is the dancing). Most of them start off in a different genre, but are quickly theatrified in much the same way, with the addition of instruments and singing voices that seem to serve no further purpose oither than to add fat to the song. The audience is never allowed to feel that they are not getting enough music for their money, and so the songs also go on for much longer than needed, absolutely wearing out their welcome. Taylor Swift doesn't need any more praise these days, but 'Beautiful Ghosts', the one song she has written for the movie, is miles better than any of the orginal songs written by Webber, including Memory, sung here by Jennifer Hudson. She is a great singer who probably would have been better off following Barbra Streisand's lead and just sing the song outside the context of Cats. Streisand's performance is more evocative as it connects to actual human feelings, rather than trying to make us care about a cat we barely know.