A live action cinematic rendering of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s classic musical CATS finally becomes feasible in our CGI-advanced era, and taking the directorial chair is one Tom Hooper (whose renown has been continuously diminishing after fortuitously nabbing the top honor in the Oscar game with THE KING’S SPEECH, 2010), his second musical adaptation after LES MISERABLES (2012).
Oscillating between a cat’s immanent quadruped gait and its human player’s biped posture, from the word go, CATS betrays the misalignment of its content’s anthropomorphism and its cast’s zoomorphism, which becomes perniciously distracting for audience to emphasize with the uncanny creatures on the screen, unlike in a live theater, where performers’ spontaneity and virtuosity can keep viewers riveting and suspending any disbelief, here, this fancifully concocted, pre-recorded commodity with every feline impersonator slinking, leaping and dancing in perfect synchrony, belting out in perfect pitch, has a much harder time to win its fans of a different medium.
While the plot doesn’t aim high in plausibility (what is the grounds of the annual new life granted ceremony? and why it is actualized like a reality talent contest?), the whole process is constituted with a series of music numbers with varying moods, but between which there is no room left for us to breathe or savor the aftertaste, a viewer’s sensorium will soon be jaded and numbed to the utter saturation, which is not alleviated by the gnawing impression that, most of Webber’s tunes last longer than what is deemed necessary.
Much has been memed and ridiculed for the furry CGI treatment that doesn’t do right by this particular genus (tant pis, even shoddier post-production effects are applied to mice and cockroaches), and Hooper’s inclination of heavily staged mise en scène again proves to be disastrous, its bisexual-lighting-infused chromatic design is too monotonous and dreary to endure after a couple of rollicking ditties.
Being a cast member of this bête noire is truly unfortunate, new Razzie nominee Dame Judi Dench rules the roost majestically as the none-too-nimble Old Deuteronomy, but it is her singing part that takes yours truly aback, shattering the ageism glass ceiling in the musical sphere; ballet dancer Francesca Hayward, cherry-picked as Victoria the White Cat, an outsider who is thrown into the rabbit hole of non-stop amazement, must look for another project as an open sesame of her movie stardom; Idris Elba, time and again, is underutilized in the mainstream pictures, a throwaway villain who is allotted with a cringeworthy number to duet with Taylor Swift; finally, among other posers and hissers, Jennifer Hudson, whose post-DREAMGIRL career sadly never takes off, now has to sing MEMORY twice with full-bore, snotty-nosed piteousness, as an Oscar winner, please show us some semblance of range, and as it turns out, everyone needs a new life out of this abysmal, exorbitant catastrophe.
referential entries: Hooper’s LES MISERABLES (2012, 6.2/10); THE KING’S SPEECH (2010, 7.3/10).
