I don't normally write film reviews on this blog but here goes. Cats had some of the worst launch reviews of any big budget movie ever. Wow, was it panned. But then so was Bohemian Rhapsody which went on to delight movie fans, break all sorts of box office records and win four Oscars. I was intrigued to see Cats as I loved the stage musical, which converted me to musical theatre. I'd always found film musicals artificial. Characters bursting into song seemingly at random spoiled any flow or plot for me (not that they ever had much plot). It didn't help that the music was generally not to my taste. When I was taken, under some duress, to see a traditional stage musical (I think it was 42nd Street) I found the experience fairly excruciating.
Fortunately we had already booked to see Cats, or that might have been it for me and live musicals. Cats was very different. For a start, why have a limited plot when you can have almost no plot at all? No wonder it proved difficult to raise the finance to launch the show. Producer Cameron Mackintosh failed to get the £450k necessary and major investors declined to back it. Andrew Lloyd Webber personally underwrote the musical, taking out a second mortgage on his house. Together with small investments from 220 people obtained through newspaper advertisements they cobbled the money together. Had Cats been a failure Lloyd Webber has said he would have been ruined financially. Instead the global phenomenon the musical became made a return of over 3500% for its investors.
The first time I saw Cats (yes, of course, I've seen it several times) I was intrigued by the round stage. Effectively there are no stage wings, so the cats enter from all directions, mainly out of the audience. Sitting near the front you can suddenly realise there is a cat - well an actor dressed in a very catlike costume with a tail - right next to you. Not just standing there, but in character all the time, making small cat-like movements and gestures. The set features everyday objects scaled to the size of the cats, ignoring the fact that they are actually human sized. The show is essentially song and dance, with quite a lot of ballet emphasising feline gracefulness together with modern dance and a bit of tap. And the problem of bursting out into song is solved by the musical being "sung through", i.e. there isn't any non-sung dialogue, as is my other all time favourite musical, Les Miserables. From the first bars of the music starting I was entranced. I must have sat so still that, at the interval Mrs H wondered if I'd fallen asleep. "Are you hating this?" she said nervously and was taken aback when I said "it's fantastic". The first time I saw Cats remains one of the most striking and memorable experiences of live entertainment I've ever experienced. I'm including seeing my first football match at Goodison Park and gigs like Pink Floyd, The Nice, Led Zeppelin and The Clash in that comparison.
I'm not a film buff. I quite like watching films but one a month is enough for me. This limited appetite may be because no film has ever induced a reaction in me like watching the best live entertainment. So I briefly wondered if I should accompany Mrs H to watch Cats at the cinema given the reviews but then set such thoughts aside. I decided I was keen to see it. That isn't always a good thing as comparisons with expectation often colour how you feel about an experience. (Yes, that probably was a factor in my enjoyment of Cats at first sight. But I've enjoyed it just as much every time I've seen it on stage).
As we left the cinema Mrs H again asked nervously "what did you think?" Although she had enjoyed it, she was again somewhat taken aback when I replied on the lines of "fantastic, awesome, brilliant". She has since said that it was the most positive reaction I have ever given to seeing a film at the cinema. My normal mode is to nitpick. It wasn't at the cinema but my favourite such nitpick was after watching the closing sequence of Die Hard 2 where the literally incredible plot line ends with John McLane, played by Bruce Willis, lying on a snow covered runway and igniting the kerosene aviation fuel spilling from the escaping jumbo jet with his lighter. The flame catches up with the plane which explodes just after taking off. Mrs H asked why I was so quiet and I replied that I was converting my guess for the take-off speed of a jumbo jet from mph to metres per second as, sadly, I remembered the flame speed for hydrocarbons in air from my days working in risk assessment. I soon concluded that this scenario didn't just require suspension of belief but defied the laws of physics by around two orders of magnitude, even without allowing for the difficulty of lighting kerosene in cold air. (I guess you might manage it with something to use as a wick at warmer temperatures but below zero I doubt). For the nerds among you I have just checked the take off speed for a jumbo: it is 184 mph which converts to over 80 metres a second. The flame speed of a hydrocarbon in air is generally less than one metre per second, so the mental arithmetic wasn't difficult. No nitpicks with Cats for me. Yes they are people dressed as Cats, that's the point. I just loved it.
It is, of course, different watching a film from a stage show. Clever stage directors can catch your peripheral vision in a theatre and steer you to what they want to see, whereas a camera just zooms in. However there are opportunities with film (and CGI) which the director of Cats chose to take. Some reviewers took issue with his choices. One review I read had also hated Tom Hooper's film of Les Miserables referring to the director's "frequent misuse of fundamental film-making techniques, like close ups and camera angles" Eh? Such folk presumably think that to make a film of a stage show you just film it, which seems daft to me as, until we have true virtual reality, watching a film will never be like watching a stage show. Overall I had no problem with what Hooper decided to do. For example, I rather liked the computer generated cockroaches that are an addition to the Gumby cat song. After all the stageshow uses short actors for the mice.
A bit like the director of the Quadrophenia film who decided he just had to inject a bit of plot into the Who's rock opera, the Cats film has more plot, some of it built in with the addition of a few spoken lines. When it's a cat pausing from singing to speak this seemed to bother me less than in a conventional musical, especially as the balance is at least 95% to singing (or should that be miaowing?) The Victoria character, which is a non-speaking/singing role in the stage show, is developed to bridge the reordered songs and create some storyline, which hangs together ok for me. There was some controversy about Victoria because mixed race Francesca Hayward of the Royal Ballet played a white cat. She dismissed claims that she had been "whitewashed" saying "it doesn't matter what colour you are when you're playing a cat". Good on her. Cats has always been balletic and it's probably part of the reason I like it. I enjoy ballet and don't enjoy traditional American style song and dance musicals, OK? Hayward dances beautifully in the film of course.
Criticism that people made up as Cats is weird seems to me, well weird. What bit of it being about cats don't they get? There was also criticism of the skin tight costumes. Well, hello, that's what the stage play has been like since it opened in 1981. I remember my late and sadly missed father in law watching the siamese cat that always features in the dance troupe very closely. Well, siamese cats are slim and they always seem to cast a very slim but shapely dancer in that role. But as Mrs H pointed out, despite the tight costumes they weren't at all revealing: there wasn't a hint of budgie smuggling about the male cats. Nothing to scare the kids there.
The director apparantly ran out of time finishing all the effects and, after the intial critical panning, made some tweaks. For me this didn't show but as we saw the revised version that's not so surprising.
What didn't I like? Mrs H thought Munkustrap, usually a strong presence, was a bit feeble and we'd both have preferred a traditional bulky baritone male as Old Deuteronomy (Brian Blessed performed the role the first time we saw the show) but it was a nice touch casting Judi Dench who was due to play Grizabella in the original stage show but had to pull out with a torn achilles tendon late in rehearsals. I must admit I always thought it was tantamount to nepotism that Elaine Page was cast in the role, her partner at the time being Lloyd Webber's buddy Tim Rice. But they needed someone in a hurry and Page had sung in Lloyd Webber's Evita. Memory from Cats was a huge hit for her and became her signature tune. And I suspect she sang it better much than Dench could have done.
My only other quibble was the way the Rum Tum Tugger was played. I accept that to ensure the U certificate the Tugger's lascivious character had to be toned down. To be fair, T. S. Elliot's original Tugger is a tamer beast: a "curious cat" who' d rather be in than out, out when in, eat fish when offered meat etc. (Sounds like every cat we've ever had, actually). The stage show has the female cats swooning at the Tugger's swishing tail and gawping at his crotch. Fair enough to step back from that but the film Tugger has been completely neutered: to exclude even the characteristic shoulder shimmies seemed barmy. After all Strictly Come Dancing goes out before the watershed hour. However, while the Tugger was toned down to the point of marginalisation, James Corden's Bustopher Jones was a hoot and Skimbleshanks the railway cat was also superbly done.
Would I have liked it so much if I hadn't loved the stage show? Who knows. Is it the best film I've seen? No, that requires something to make me think a bit more. The Shawshank Redemption or One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest for example. But was it the most enjoyable? Certainly one of them, yes.
What do punters think? On Google the reviews are split mainly between people who love it (5 out of 5) and people who hate it (1 out of 5). The mean score is around 3 but that's the least common score given. So the film is polarising. If you don't like singing and sancing I really wouldn't bother with the it but if you ever get the chance to see the stage show it would be worth a try as it really isn't like anything else I've ever seen. If you have an open mind I'd say ignore the reviews and go and see the film. I expect you'll see plenty of people, especially families, enjoying themselves. And as the musical has been enjoyed by millions I expect the film, while probably not winning awards or breaking box office records will do quite well.
We saw only one positive review of the film. Brian Viner of the Daily Mail said "Cats is really demented - but it works!". I agree.
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