Cats (2019) is a cinematic disaster in a uniquely entertaining way. For a movie without any clear plot, it is astonishing how much confusion the movie crams into every scene, taking no pauses between the onslaught of disturbing visuals and incomprehensible lyrics and dialogue. It is an experience unlike any other, and it feels like lucid dreaming while wandering around a city you’ve never been in, except it’s a musical.
The famed Broadway musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber, from which this abomination of a movie spawned, is arguably one of the worst musicals of all time. The basic story is virtually incomprehensible even when presented in its longer stage format, making the movie adaptation both true to the original and also a horrible idea for any producer.
The bare basic plot that I picked up from the shattered remains of poor world-building and no understanding of lyrics consisted of this: The cats want to die, but only one Jellicle cat can be chosen at the Jellicle ball under the Jellicle moon to be reborn. One of the cats, Old Deuteronomy, played by actor Dame Judy Dench, makes the choice of which competing cat gets to die. The antagonist is an evil magician cat who kidnaps and retrains other cats in an attempt to be the cat who gets reborn.
But this movie does not care about its plot. Do you know what it does care about? Repetitive songs introducing cats who show up, sing their name and defining characteristic, dance a little and disappear into the background. Walking out of the movie theater, I did not remember a single character’s name beyond Victoria (Francesca Hayward) and that’s only because she was the main character, as well as the only cat with a human name.
The whole movie felt like a fever dream. The first 30 seconds of the film start the establishing shots that, to be frank, do not establish anything at all. I could not identify where any of the characters were in one shot in relation to where they would be in the next, leaving the whole movie feeling disjointed.
Right out of the gate, the audience is introduced to horrible human depictions of what are supposed to be cats. I only gathered that they were, indeed, cats from the constant mentioning of the word “cat” and the title of the movie. I am almost convinced that nobody involved with the production has ever seen a cat in real life.
The first song in any musical is supposed to establish what the audience is to expect from the rest of the movie; in this respect, Cats (2019) succeeded brilliantly, which is to say that the first song perfectly captures every bit of disturbed nightmarish confusion that was the entirety of Cats (2019).
This introductory song was supposed to introduce, as the title of the song would suggest, “Jellicle Songs for Jellicle Cats,” where the demonic felines repeated the word “Jellicle” 76 times. What does “Jellicle” mean? I have no idea. But they repeated the word enough times that it wouldn’t have felt like a real word if it had been one to begin with.
If you were hoping for an explanation of what the adjective “Jellicle” means, you would be out of luck because, without any warning, the first song fades out, and the audience is immediately plunged into the depths of a second confusing song about naming cats and how cats really have three different names, which is also never cohesively explained.
There is no expositional dialogue between songs; the movie is just a song after useless song. This style of musical can work beautifully if done correctly, but, in order for that to succeed, the lyrics need to explain what on earth is going on, which Cats did not do in the slightest. I did not feel like the characters on screen were saying actual words, which of course, sometimes they were not, as previously mentioned about the word “Jellicle.”
The only times I could completely understand what words were being sung was when cats would repeat the same lyric over and over and over again. On the off chance that I heard the lyric clearly, it was never useful information; instead it was something like, “Because Jellicles can and Jellicles do/Jellicles do and Jellicles can,” which provided no additional information as to the plot or setting or anything because, as I have repeated before, I do not know what Jellicle means!
All of my previous complaints are focused both towards the written musical and the movie adaptation, so let me highlight issues more prevalent to the movie adaptation.
This movie was remarkable in its expenditures. So much talent and money went into producing this feline fever dream of a movie. The acting talent was highly variable. For example, Jennifer Hudson played Grizabella, the cat who sings the most recognizable Cats song “Memory.” Her performance was emotionally raw and beautiful, only to be undercut by the awful visuals and the addition of pouring snot when she cried.
Dame Judy Dench played the notorious Old Deuteronomy. This woman is a dame. I will consider her involvement in this movie to be on the same level as Sir Patrick Stewart playing a poop emoji in The Emoji Movie (2017).
The visuals have been universally criticized, and I can confirm that these complaints are incredibly accurate. This uncanny-valley extravaganza is hard to look at, and it never stops being hard to look at. The feet of the cats would clip through the ground. Halfway through a dance number with human-like cockroaches, the person I saw the film with turned to me and said, “They don’t have any shadows.” Additionally, in a couple of instances, the faces seemed to float on the bodies.
Many of the shots seemed hand-held or shaky, which made everything feel wrong. Might I mention that I saw the remastered version of the movie? I can only imagine what this movie was like originally. I pity the talented editors who were forced to remaster this painful creation in a week.
The uncomfortable feeling is not solely attributable to the editing, because the acting was also disturbing. I counted nearly a dozen moments in which two cats seemed to lean into kiss and then didn’t. I did not want the CGI-nightmare cats to kiss, but every time they leaned in, I just wanted them to stop or get it over with. The actors pet, hissed at and wiggled their shoulders at each other, and it never stopped being concerning.
Overall, Cats manages to accomplish one of the most impressive failures of a large production and is likely to go unparalleled for a long time. The number of radical heights and plummeting failures this movie managed to pull off is arguably going to be one of the biggest cinematic mysteries of this century. So many people had to agree to this movie’s creation, yet it still went all the way to the big screen.
Let this movie serve as a warning to future developers who want to make Broadway shows on the big screen, but also let it serve as encouragement to young filmmakers: know that having a budget and big celebrities doesn’t mean you have a good movie, and you do not need money to make a cohesive narrative.
