The movie “Cats” is—forgive the critical jargon—pretty good. Its elements are gathered and chosen and crafted attentively. The actors range from lively to passionate to profound. The lyrics, drawn from T. S. Eliot’s poems, are ingenious, and the music, by Andrew Lloyd Webber, is, for the most part, catchy and varied. The choreography, by Andy Blankenbuehler, is energetic, spacious, and precise. The movie has a clear and symbolically resonant dramatic arc, and there’s an inherent pleasure to its being constructed almost entirely of production numbers. As for the basic idea, the C.G.I. transformation of people into cats, the result is indeed uncanny, in a welcome way. The digital costuming appears on the actors as cat-fur leotards with long tails attached, with everyone’s ears concealed and replaced pointily on the top of their heads—and so much the better. In a year when the biggest movies involve a Hulk and assorted androids, the fantastical demands of “Cats” seem no more (and, happily, no less) unreasonable. Unlike recent bloated efforts in superheroes and franchise sci-fi, the digital wizardry of the feline-human hybrids of “Cats” is provocative, idiosyncratic, and surprising. It puts the power and the peculiarity of its own manipulations up front.
The ingredients of “Cats” perched the production on the edge of real distinction. It could have been an allegorical fantasy of giddy delight and haunting depth which matched the inspiration of Eliot’s poems. Instead, nearly every sequence seems somehow off: the dances hardly perceptible, the performances presented only in glimmers, the allegorical elements clumsily and grossly mishandled. “Cats” is an object lesson in the art of directing and the risks that it entails.. A musical—in particular, the filming of song and dance—presents one of the most stringent tests of direction that the movies can offer, because musical direction is akin to architecture, a blend of science and art, of geometrical abstraction and lyrical imagination.
Little in the career of Tom Hooper, the director of “Cats,” offered much hope. He has made dull, emotionally drubbing movies in which blandness (“The Damned United”) and stylelessness (“The King’s Speech”) veer toward tastelessness (“Les Misérables,” “The Danish Girl”). Nonetheless, filmmakers often strike new veins of inspiration mid-career, and the audacity of the digital conceit that Hooper undertook in “Cats” suggested the potential for other bold new ideas. Yet, not long into the production, it’s apparent that Hooper has filmed the dances like a professional—that is to say, with no sense of his own desires and curiosities, no sense of himself as an interested spectator filming what he wants to see. Rather, he films with a sense of what’s expected of him—of delivering to viewers an experience that he himself isn’t having.
The failure is all the more disheartening inasmuch as the cast is remarkable. A shy and refined cat named Victoria (Francesca Hayward) is tossed from a fancy car and left as a stray in an alley. There, she falls in with a society of so-called Jellicle cats, a self-chosen tribe whose diverse membership is preparing for a grand ritual, the Jellicle Ball, during which the cats compete in a song competition judged by a priestly figure called Old Deuteronomy (Judi Dench); the winner ascends to a heavenly sphere called the Heaviside Layer, as a prelude to reincarnation. These activities are shadowed by two major characters exerting powerful influence from the margins of the action—a supervillain, Macavity (Idris Elba), who uses force, conspiracies, and tricks in an effort to win the competition, and a ragged and melancholic outcast cat called Grizabella (Jennifer Hudson), whose former performing career is over and whose name is tarnished by her association with Macavity.
The assembled felines include Jennyanydots—a lounging house cat played, with carnal flair, by Rebel Wilson—who shows off a practical, choreographic side by organizing a handful of mice into a singing group and wrangling cockroaches into a well-drilled chorus line. Hooper films the sequence with winks to Busby Berkeley (a tracking shot through the dancers’ legs, a so-called top shot showing the dancing bugs’ circular formation from overhead); but these scenes don’t do more than allude to Hooper’s awareness of Berkeley’s films. Berkeley, a philosopher in images, is easy to pay homage to but very hard to add to. The sheer delight of his images are unmatched.
Ian McKellen plays Gus, the grizzled Theatre Cat, who reminisces about his erstwhile years of glory with an aptly histrionic grandeur, elegance, and nostalgia. James Corden, as the epicurean and Falstaffian gourmand Bustopher Jones, is bluff and exuberant (before meeting an unfortunate end, yielding to one temptation too many). Dench inhabits her hieratic role with wisdom, grace, nobility, and a sense of moment; Elba invests Macavity with fierce and insinuating power. Hayward—a principal ballerina at the Royal Ballet, in London—brings a tremulous spontaneity and fragile wonder to the role of Victoria. Hudson’s pathos is operatic in its extravagance, reverberant even in its silences.
Hooper guides this splendid cast through detailed performances but serves the actors poorly in his filming. There’s hardly a closeup that would be out of place in a television-news studio, with the actors reduced to singing heads—seen not too close to provoke disarming cinematic intimacy, not too far to threaten the marketing of personality. Above all, Hooper’s direction dispels the energy of the performers. During the dances, there is no sense of scale, scope, or physicality. He offers impressions of dancing rather than dances, reducing Blankenbuehler’s choreography and the dancers’ spirited work into a virtual highlight reel for itself.
These basic failures of taste and sensibility are a subset of Hooper’s over-all failure of literal vision: he doesn’t really see what he’s doing, and the virtual invisibility of his own movie to himself is reflected in an odd set of metaphors that result from his casting. The diversity of the cast is admirable, yet Hooper veers toward what could charitably be called color blindness. The result is a transformation of the story into a two-pronged narrative: the expulsion of a black male arch-criminal (who’s even responsible for the movie’s drug trade—the scattering of catnip powder, by his henchwoman Bombalurina, played by Taylor Swift) and the recognition by a white woman of the virtue of a poor and despised black woman, Grizabella, who transforms her anguish and exclusion into music. (Deuteronomy even says that she’s evaluating the cats on the basis of their “soul.”) What’s more, for the role of Victoria—called, in the play, “Victoria the White Cat”—Hooper does more than put the character into white fur. He strangely, pointlessly, and irresponsibly has Hayward, a light-skinned black woman, wear makeup that can rightly be described as whiteface. The allegory, of a community that lets in and exalts the soulful black person and expels the dangerous one, is solely a result of the casting (and the grossly misguided makeup). It’s obviously far from what Webber had in mind; I suspect that it’s also far from what Hooper had in mind. But the movie’s casting, likely undertaken with the best of artistic intentions, is of a piece with the direction of the dance and the framing of the action: it’s simply oblivious. Hooper not only fails to see clearly the movie’s fantasies; he doesn’t see its realities, either.
