Canary Duty - Cats

You may be wondering why the hell I'm bothering with this one; hell, cats have been known to eat canaries after all.  Well the thing is that there's been a lot of... performative outrage over this one ever since the first trailer came out, and I admit that in coining the line "Dr. Moreau's Reject Pile" I was part of that.  A lot of these bad reviews have been huge scale attacks on the whole thing, some being oddly very well worded for something where the press screenings were only a few days ago.  So I thought I should go in with a more level head in mind.  I should mention that though I'm familiar with the stage show, and actually have a few friends that have done Cats costumes before, I haven't actually seen the whole thing, so this is me going in completely fresh, no real expectations about how it "should be", just a filmgoer saying "OK movie, impress me!".  I'm writing this opening paragraph before going in, so let's see if the hyperbole was justified...

:one attempted viewing later...:

Jesus wept.

I actually had to give up after about 40 minutes (it was Ray Winstone starting to "sing" which was the last straw).  This is just painful to watch.  No, that's not an exaggeration, I actually felt real physical discomfort watching this.  There's actually a solid reason why, and it's a symptom of one of this film's big issues.  So whilst I can't do a full review of the whole thing, what I did see was enough for me to talk about a major problem with this film, as I realized that what I was seeing was a repeat offense.

Cats is directed by Tom Hooper, who also directed Les Miserables a few years ago.  Going into Cats, I was hoping that he had learned a major lesson since then, and wouldn't repeat the same mistake that killed Les Mis for me; nope!  See, his problem as a director is that he has no idea about the importance of cinematography.  Film Critic Hulk wrote about this many years ago, and behind the walls of block capitals makes a damn good case.  However, I'll explain the point in my own words here.  

Simply put, the way a scene is filmed makes a big difference to how the scene feels.  For example, if a scene is done with a handheld shot, with a lot of movement of the camera, it often communicates tension, a feeling of everything is going wrong (it's why it gets used a lot in desperate foot chase scenes).  A close up is good for capturing a particular moment of big emotion in an actor's face.  What's more, how a scene is filmed is important for what details you want the audience to pay attention to, when you want them to understand what a shot is about.  So you might use a lens with a low depth of field to put one particular detail in focus with the rest blurred out, therefore making clear what the vital thing is.  The best films get the way a scene is filmed and what is actually being filmed working hand-in-hand to communicate ideas and emotions, bringing about the right response in the audience.  That all clear?  If you grasped that idea, then congratulations, you understand visual storytelling better than Tom Hooper does!

Hooper is astonishingly tone-deaf... erm, tone-blind in how his films are photographed.  In Les Miserables, most of the big musical numbers were filmed as close-ups, with a depth of field so narrow that only bits of the actors' faces were in focus.  Hell, with Anne Hathaway's rendition of I Dreamed a Dream, only the end of her nose was clearly filmed!  This is an appalling way to film a musical, where it's all about the big staging, the physicality of belting out the songs.  Now of course you have to change staging when you move from a theatre production to the big screen, but this an utterly alien way of moving between the two.  You're not meant to see these songs presented right up to audience's faces like this!  What's more, most of the film was done with shaky handheld.  You know, what you use for conveying tension, and it's used all the time, even in comedy scenes.  Why, I dunno!

So, has he gotten any better by the time of Cats?  Let me put it like this, three minutes in I wanted to hunt down Hooper and yell in his face "TRIPOD MOTHERFUCKER, HAVE YOU EVER HEARD OF A FUCKING TRIPOD?!?".  This is what I meant by it actually being genuinely painful to watch, as no joke I was feeling queasy as a result of watching the opening scenes.  It was such a mishmash with the introduction, as it was filmed in the way you would a horror movie, but it's meant to be a whimsical introduction to the cast.  Oh, but it's not just the camera attacking us this time, it's also the editing.  I don't think a single shot lasted longer than about four seconds, with the exception of Grizabella's introduction number.  In fact, the awkward camerawork, and the odd focus on her crying with snot, means that we literally had a scene in a musical with a filming style more akin to The Blair Witch Project!  Apparently the film only finished editing last Sunday; given how many quick cuts there are just in the part I saw, I can understand why it took so long!

Why it's a particular problem in here is to do with Cats' main raison d'etre.  No-one comes to Cats for the plot and story, because there really isn't one, it's basically a bunch of felines introducing themselves via poetry set to music, and then one goes through basically the kitteh version of carousel from Logan's Run.  It's all about the dancing, the Hot Gossip style dancers done up as slimline Thundercats (and maybe one memorable song, appropriately named Memory).  So this issue with the awkward filming is exacerbated here in that you have a bunch of the cast members and a lot of background players putting a lot of effort into their dance skills, with full choreography, but the camerawork and editing mean that we can't follow any of it.  When you're on stage, your eyes can more naturally move with the dancers, or a particular performer, as they go across the stage.  In film, you are at the mercy of the God's Eye which is the lens of the camera, so if it's not looking at the right thing, or it's bouncing between different viewpoints too fast, there goes any chance to properly following it!  It means an astonishing waste of talent; you can tell that a lot of time and effort has gone into this, but Hooper is determined to not less us see and appreciate any of it!

Is it any wonder then that I felt no connection to the "characters" on screen?  In fact, with this level of disregard to how the finished film would look, is it any wonder that the cast look as bad in the digital fur and such as they do?  Man, it speaks volumes to how bad the cinematography situation is in that I've gotten this far without saying a word about the look of the characters until now!  But that's the issue; when you get the art of filming a movie this badly wrong, it can utterly break the audience's immersion in the film, it leaves you stuck outside, adrift and unable to connect with it.  And that's why I left after only a third of the film played out, I realised that if I wasn't going to connect with it by then, it's never going to grab me.

So I can't fairly give a proper review of this film, as obviously I can't judge it as a whole, but I think I have made clear my feelings about the thing that broke it for me.  Of course it must be said that the camerawork was far from the only problem the film has; I did see the awkwardness of Rebel Wilson's number, complete with eating humanoid cockroaches, and a weird action borrowed from Superted.  But since so many other critics are focusing on aspects like the story and the weird look of the Cats themselves, I thought I'd focus on one big issue that, whilst it makes a big difference, might be harder to consciously notice amongst everything else going on.  I can't honestly say that what I saw was a funny bad movie, the way Showgirls or Battlefield Earth could be, it was just rendered kinda dull.  Look, just don't go to see this one, and maybe the next time a big West End musical gets turned into a film, the director can be someone who can understand how to film a musical!