This article transcribes a video essay available here, titled “Cats is a triumph of the cinematic form.”
Cats, the 2019 movie directed by Tom Hooper, represents countless hours of work-power, in likely miserable conditions, assembling what is unmistakably the world’s highest budget work of furry cinema.
Hooper, fresh off the success of the Les Misérables movie adaptation, which I hate, likely had a free reign to interpret as he wished the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical CATS, itself a loose adaptation of T. S. Elliot’s poetry collection “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats”. The Webber musical is his standard campy fare, lurid face-paint and costumes in the fashion of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat or Phantom of the Opera, two other musicals which had their own dubious route to the big (or small) screen.
Easily the least interesting parts in Cats are where Tom Hooper concedes to the style that won him critical acclaim with Les Misérables and holds a steady close-up of an impassioned face singing a showstopper. Where he’s persuaded away from it, we get Rebel Wilson tearing the head off a cockroach with a human face, Jason Derulo showering himself with milk as a rake of female cats watch in awe, and a succession of cats improbably wearing human clothing seemingly only for fetishistic effect — an even more convincing case for Tom Hooper being prevented from filming close-ups than anything in Les Misérables. Macavity, the cat devil, is introduced with a Batman-like sudden disappearance once he’s off-camera — but the next time he appears he really can teleport and does it constantly for the rest of the film.
The film is determined to see any suggestion that there’s a sexual undertone off at the pass. Over the first thirty minutes, cats present their groins, arch their thighs, tangle round each other almost deliberately so that there’s as much contact with their Barbie-doll under-sections and chests as possible. Every cat is wearing a human-sized collar. Rebel Wilson’s cat bends her tail forward between her legs and swings it like a windmill. Cats wear fursuits, gorge themselves on food and dive into trash cans to rub themselves in waste. When a male character hits a high note, there is a conversation about neutering where Rebel Wilson makes a chop-chop motion with her fingers. As mentioned, Jason Derulo pours milk into his own mouth as he lies back on the floor. The cats devour other, smaller humanoids with a smile and a wink. During his song, there is a lingering shot where Jason Derulo has a furry cat foot inches from mouth with a furry cat foot. By the time three cats are cavorting on a bed together covered in feathers you’re absolutely numb to it, and the film proceeds to get into the plot — and even the plot involves all the cats getting high, having a PG-rated orgy, then lying about groaning for a good minute. Idris Elba’s character is fully dressed for the majority of the film, just so that when he appears sans garments in the climax, you can’t escape any suggestion, Idris Elba is nude now.
As critics have mentioned, the film makes minimal effort to explain who anyone is or what they’re doing. They’re cats, they’re having some kind of event, most of them are going to sing one song, the word Jellicle is involved, get with the program. The cats sing an entire song about the importance of the protagonists’ “real” cat name, but we never find it out. It’s just not for us to know. One member of the main cast is never properly introduced and doesn’t have a song. At one point I thought he was singing about himself but he turned out to be singing about a cat dressed as a male stripper.
Much of the prerelease buzz around Cats focused on the uncanny appearance of the characters, human faces rotoscoped by hand onto almost-matching CG bodies. What the previews did not reveal, is that the rest of the film compensates for this effect by being equally uncanny, unsettled, and unmoored from conventional notions of filmmaking. The structure of Cats — individual vignettes about the mercurial nature of individual Cats — is forcibly bookended by an overarching plot in which Francesca Hayward’s character, ‘Victoria’ is abandoned by her (full scale human!) owner, such as it were, and falls into the company of a gaggle of cats who immediately begin a chain of often unintelligible songs which continue end-to-end for the rest of the film, save for brief interruptions by the antagonist, Macavity, played by a gurning, scenery-gnawing Idris Elba. The cats hold a yearly competition, we are repeatedly told, where the victor receives a ‘second chance at life’. This plot structure being clamped around the more freeform nature of the musical adds a terrifying air of inevitability to proceedings, and makes the eventual awarding of the prize to Grizabella feel less like the triumph of good nature and compassion and more like “oh crap, gotta foist this ticking bomb off on someone before Idris Elba gets back. The sense of unease and the unknown is shared between the audience and Victoria, but it leaves the more carefree earlier songs feel like they’ve been shot through the sights of a gun. “Stop dancing!” you want to scream at the screen, “Idris Elba is murdering you!”
Between this and the borderline-violent reaction unnamed cats have to the down-and-out Grizabella every time she appears, cat society is deeply unsettling, and that’s before the Taylor-Swift-penned addition to the songbook “Beautiful Ghosts” has appeared, with the haunting refrain “The memories were lost long ago, but at least you have beautiful ghosts”.
Perhaps to provide cover for some less prioritised effects shots, the camera often appears as if in the hand of a drunkard, dipping and rolling with the music in a way that almost induces illness, especially combined with how, over the course of the film, the scope of the visuals slowly narrows and a set of basic images recurs: The theatre door, the bolted milk-parlour, Grizabella in the street, the graveyard entrance, Old Deuteronomy beckons, repeat. One of the most striking visuals, a stairway to heaven summoned by Macavity when he seeks to force Old Deuteronomy to grant him a second life, does not reappear at the denouement. Instead, Grizabella is loaded into a balloon and floated off into the sky.
The protagonist sings of dancing with ghosts; Grizabella is “saved” by being jettisoned into the sky and forgotten. The cats who are kidnapped by Macavity throw Ray Winstone, of Noah fame, into the Thames to drown - and cheer while they do it. Taylor Swift’s cat disappears halfway through the third act. It’s hard not to come to the conclusion that the film is telling us that the cats are in hell, or at least in purgatory. There is a cat devil, but there is no cat god.
Let me be clear about what I am saying: this film is an absolute triumph. It’s utterly bizarre, obeys only its own logic, and I would have eagerly watched another hour of it. Go and see this film.
The image of Old Deuteronomy stretching her leg in this article is taken from Twitter user @MrMichaelSwartz’s video.
