Academy Award-Winning Director Tom Hooper’s Cats

Or, Lo and Behold: The End of Idris Elba’s Career

Who thought it was a good idea to make a film adaptation of Cats? The 1981 Andrew Lloyd-Webber show is an innovative and highly influential spectacle that transformed stage musicals into the big-budget blockbusters we know today. But it also couldn’t be less suited to cinema if it tried. It is, first and foremost, deeply weird. Adapted from T. S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, a collection of whimsical and disconnected poems about — you guessed it — cats, the musical is effectively two and a half hours of character introductions with the thinnest plot imaginable. It’s a lot of campy fun, the vast majority of the song are bangers and the choreography is stunning but without a radical re-imagining nothing about it immediately lends itself to a film adaptation.

Unfortunately, no one told Universal. Having acquired the film rights for Cats many years earlier, they decided in 2013 to finally get on with it. Presumably, high off of the astronomic success of 2012’s Les Misérables, they decided to adapt whatever other musical they had close to hand and ride that gravy train to another quick buck. Turns out, however, that picking one of the strangest, least cinematic musicals in existence wasn’t the best choice. Eventually, in 2016, they got Les Mis director Tom Hooper on board but it would still be a while before they figured out the technicalities of adapting this thing. In 2018 they still hadn’t decided between live action or CGI, so I assume they just went “screw it, why not both?”

The film’s method of transforming its actors into cats through uncanny valley CGI is not pretty and Hooper does not ease you into it. Just as you think you might be starting to cope, during Jennyanydots’ musical number a trio of human children transformed into CGI mice are introduced with very little warning. Then, before you can recover from that, a troupe of cockroaches animated with the same technique appears. It’s nightmarish and that’s before Rebel Wilson starts eating them.

You do eventually get used to the visual horror. Mostly. So long as the shots are wide enough that you don’t have to stare into the human faces too closely it’s alright. Unfortunately, Hooper is notorious for his obsession with close-ups. Whilst Cats zooms out more than his typical film, there were still too many times when I was begging him to pull the camera back. The final musical number spends an awfully long time lingering on Judi Dench’s cat face as she breaks the fourth wall to remind us “a cat is not a dog”.

Hooper is just a baffling choice for this film. Sure he gave Universal a smash hit with Les Mis, but Cats is not Les Mis and a director as middle-of-the-road as him is not going to have the imagination necessary to reinvent Cats into something fit for screen. Somebody as irreverent as Taika Waititi or with a track record of making things that shouldn’t work work, such as Lego Movie directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, could have pulled this off if the studio gave them the space to go nuts. Instead, this is a highly faithful transplant of the stage musical, to its detriment.

The plot of the musical revolves around Old Deuteronomy, the leader of the Jellicle Cats, deciding at the Jellicle Ball who to send to the Heaviside Layer and be reincarnated into a new life. Yeah, I know, but on stage it doesn’t really matter. Cinema, on the other hand, demands something a bit more substantial. Hooper and co-writer Lee Hall (yes, Billy Elliot Lee Hall) made the smart decision to depict events from the perspective of a more characterised version of the White Cat Victoria, giving the audience a surrogate that loosely ties the song numbers together into something resembling coherence. Beyond this, however, little has changed, leaving the plot fatally inadequate.

The major failure of Hooper’s adaptation is him and his choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler’s inability to recognise the storytelling potential of dance in the same way that the original musical’s choreographer Gillian Lynne did. The majority of the show’s most nuanced and beautiful character moments are depicted through dance, especially in the case of the fallen and outcast Grizabella. In the film’s case, however, dance is treated as little more than spectacle and character is instead depicted through Hooper’s preferred method of excessive close-ups or perfunctory expository dialogue. Grizabella’s character is largely conveyed by Jennifer Hudson’s persistent crying, which screams Oscar desperation almost as loudly as Leonardo DiCaprio in The Revenant.

As a whole, the performances are a mixed bag. The casting is already an odd hodgepodge of professional dancers and A-list actors and the disparity shows. The seasoned actors tend to do a solid job of bringing their characters to life — especially Sir Ian McKellen as the aged Gus the Theatre Cat — whilst having limited singing and dancing prowess. Meanwhile, the dancers tend not to be abundant in personality (ballerina Francesca Hayward’s Victoria has an awkward romance subplot with Mr. Mistoffelees to compensate) but are highly competent physical performers. The two pop stars Jason Derulo and Taylor Swift do alright at both, if you can look past their horrible London accents, and James Corden fares surprisingly well as Bustopher Jones.

There are also some real duds. Rebel Wilson is irritating and terrifying as Jennyanydots and the fat jokes at her expense are inexcusably outdated. It is Idris Elba, however, that comes out of this the worst. His performance as the villainous Macavity is humiliating on every level, reaching its absurd peak when he shouts his name like a Pokémon whilst kidnapping Gus the Theatre Cat. It probably would have been less embarrassing for him if his sex tape leaked; at least his naked body wouldn’t have been covered in horrifyingly shiny CGI fur.

Speaking of naked Idris Elba, an unavoidable fact of the original musical is that it is very horny. Whilst this film is more sexually charged than your average U-certificate feature, the number of booty shots in comparison to the 1998 filmed production are tragically lacking. That said, there is one area in which the film bests the stage show. Where before the costume tails were subject to the laws of gravity and therefore disappointingly flaccid, the use of CGI here means their phallic potential is fully realised. Still, the film could have done with a lot more sexual energy. Perhaps Call Me by Your Name director Luca Guadagnino should have been at the helm.

The musical’s best qualities, however, are not completely lost in adaptation. The largely great songs are done well and the film knows when to lean into a cracking chorus (Macavity: The Mystery Cat and Mr. Mistoffelees are probably the standout musical numbers). There’s also a new song Lloyd-Webber co-wrote with Taylor Swift. By itself, it’s rather lovely, with a gorgeous melody and solid lyricism. Foolishly though both times its performed immediately after Memory, the best song in the musical. And even though Swift’s lyrics aren’t bad, they read like someone trying to sound like they’re writing for a more conventional musical, meaning they feel very out of place next to Eliot’s idiosyncratic poetry. "All that I wanted is to be wanted" just doesn't fit alongside "Practical cats, Dramatical cats / Pragmatical cats, Fanatical cats / Oratorical cats, Delphic-oracle cats / Skeptical cats, Dispeptical cats."

The tone of this review may sound like I despised this film but the truth is I had a whale of a time. Hooper does make some awful decisions but the majority of the film is too preposterous to be measured on any conventional scale of 'good' and 'bad'. It is, in many ways, an absurdist masterpiece, destined to become a cult hit even if it also achieves its likely commercial flop status. I’m glad I abandoned rating films on an out of ten scale a while ago because I have no idea what score I would give this film. On one level it is somewhat disappointing. Whilst the musical has no obvious cinematic potential, with a little imagination and a lot of guts there's enough there to work with. On the other hand, this adaptation is disastrous in the most hilarious way and it will serve many a drunk midnight screening nicely. In other words, I'm not sure who I should recommend Academy Award-winning director Tom Hooper's Cats to but everyone should definitely watch it.