When I saw “Cats” at a preview screening the other night, something happened toward the end that I’ve never actually experienced at a movie before. It came as the legendary British actress Judi Dench, digitally pixelated into a giant orange tabby named Old Deuteronomy, spoke-sung the lyrics of the final number, “The Ad-dressing of Cats.” As Dame Judi carefully enunciated each verse, then paused, then started a new verse, the audience began to titter. Then laugh. Then roar. Because each pause seemed to signal — at long last — the film’s end, each new verse became a fresh source of hilarity. It was that rare occurrence: a packed theater going the full “Springtime for Hitler” and giving release to blessed, hard-earned mockery.
I truly believe our divided nation can be healed and brought together as one by “Cats” — the musical, the movie, the disaster. In other news, my eyes are burning. Oh God, my eyes.
You’ve heard of the “uncanny valley” effect? The eeriness or revulsion felt when looking at a humanoid figure that’s not quite human? The digital era has given us many examples of the uncanny valley, but “Cats” is the first movie to entirely set up shop there. Based on the hardy Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, first staged in 1981 and still running somewhere on the planet, the film represents a further reworking of the original source, T.S. Eliot’s 1939 poetry collection, “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats.” Instead of the stage version’s costume and make-up, however, director Tom Hooper (“The King’s Speech,” “Les Miserables”) has chosen to CGI and green-screen his talented cast of dancers and stars into furry bodysuits with whiskers, cat ears, and prehensile tails.
The effect just doesn’t take. With certain players — Jennifer Hudson as Grizabella, Robbie Fairchild as Munkustrap, even Francesca Hayward of the Royal Ballet as the naïve newcomer Victoria — the faces seem to eerily float atop the faux fur, never quite jelling into one plane of vision. Some cats wear clothes, some don’t; all are, um, neutered. As Macavity the Mystery Cat, Idris Elba has been villainized with green contact lenses and a trench coat; when in one dance number he appears without the coat, it’s like suddenly seeing him naked. Except not. None of this seems conducive to the hoped-for air of whimsy and wonder.
In fact, there are moments in “Cats” I would gladly pay to unsee, including the baby mice with faces of young girls and the tiny chorus line of cockroach Rockettes — again, with human faces — that Jennyanydots gleefully swallows with a crunch. Anyone who takes small children to this movie is setting them up for winged-monkey levels of night terrors.
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