I’ve grown accustomed to iconic songs being played on repeat every single time either on the radio or in your neighborhood, sometimes even when people would belt their lungs out at a karaoke. Once a song reaches a point wherein people regardless of race, gender or social status sings your song in the most casual fashion, you will know that this song has reached its peak. Imagine good ol’ Frank’s My Way not being sung by the local drunkard in your area or Whitney’s version of Dolly Parton’s I Will Always Love You not being belted by divas in singing competitions. True, we can live without these songs but the idea of them not being a part of our lives is almost like eating your favorite dinner every day without ever enjoying every bite you make: the essence fades into the void and you’re left staring and wondering blankly, asking yourself why this had to happen.
In my case, I have grown up listening to old soul (think Sweet Love by Anita Baker or You’ll Never Walk Alone by the Queen of Gospel herself, miss Mahalia Jackson) and show tunes (you can never go wrong with Sondheim’s polyphonic style in his musicals or songs from the collaboration of Rodgers and Hammerstein). Take either of them out of my life’s equation and my life would feel incomplete, like a missing puzzle piece that disappeared out of thin air and is left to be found. I remember my uncle introducing me to the icon that is Andrew Lloyd Webber by making me listen to a song called Any Dream Will Do (trust me, not a good first time to enter a portal to the universe of show tunes) and I clearly remember my eyes swelling after a bucketful of tears fell from it as I was sitting inside my uncle’s Imaginarium of a room on our desolate duplex. Listening to music has been life-changing ever since. And now, as I play the whole film production of Webber’s legendary musical Cats in my head (let it be known too that I have seen the home video version of the play a number of years ago), the film is a deranged, nightmarish vision of hyper-theatrical felines coming to life on a screen that is sure to leave a mark on its witnesses, in the worst of ways.
Cats follows a three-act structure, beginning with a youthful white cat named Victoria (ballet prodigy Francesca Hayward) being abandoned by her owners in the middle of the streets until she is discovered by a posse of pussies who are members of a cat tribe called the Jellicles. The Jellicles are a bunch of diverse cats from different walks of cat-life, such as the thick-boned bourgeois Bustopher Jones (James Corden), the seasoned theatre performer Gus (Ian McKellen), the lax vermin ruler Jennyanydots (Rebel Wilson), the perverse hype-beast Rum Tum Tugger (Jason Derulo) and the astonishing conjurer Mr. Mistoffelees (Laurie Davidson), to name a select few. Victoria’s involvement with the tribe grows bigger as she begins to desire reincarnation, which in the Jellicles’ case is by ascending into the Heaviside Layer, the tribe’s idea of moksha or paradise, the same way the Jellicles do. In order to make her way to the ascension her heart desires, she must compete in the Jellicle Ball along with the rest of the tribe who seeks to find their way into cat heaven. Along the way, cat-astrophe ensues as the leader of mischief Macavity (Idris Elba) demands to become the choice of the tribe’s matriarch Deuteronomy (Judi Dench) for the ascension.
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A film like Cats is something that should and should not be taken seriously (if that makes any sense at all). The story of Victoria and the Jellicles after all deals with identity and acceptance, regardless of origin or background. By welcoming Victoria into the clowder, she finds a new home with the Jellicles, a sort of fulfillment in itself for a stray who has been left behind. The theme is not alien to the minds of many, but it’s sure to find many people relate themselves to especially in the era of social media. Not only that, the story’s direction and the names or terms used seem to be heading to a more evangelical side, dealing with sin and salvation almost akin to the biblical events of the Christian scriptures (with Heaviside Layer as heaven, the Jellicle ball as the purgatory, Old Deuteronomy as a mediator of sorts like Jesus or Moses, to name a few). And of course, with the story’s climax leading to one of its important characters singing Memory, a recollection of the past wherein beauty and power was within one’s reach until these have been stripped from oneself, the film encourages its viewers that anything is possible so long as society begins to open its eyes and accepts the many individual differences that define our existence.
That being said, Cats is still a meow-thful. Tom Hooper frames the narrative in ways that will make us forget the other iconic songs and scenes that highlight the essence of this classic musical. A perfect example of this is the way the sequence of Mr. Mistoffelees was shown; instead of exhibiting the sequence with a high dose of empowerment in the case of the eponymous character of the song as he discovers the power of magic that he’s had in him (or it?) all along, the film dealt with the song in a mew-serable way to a point that the impact of the song, arguably the most iconic song next to Memory, has faded into the deranged obscurity of the whole cat-aclysm. And almost like an episode of The Twilight Zone, Cats descends into a cosmic horror of grotesque creatures seeking validation from one another, an unnatural feline explosion that embraces its camp to the fullest, but never makes any sense upon viewing because of its structural mess. As the characters start coming in, the audience gets a glimpse of who they are and what they are like and it becomes like that for so long that the main conceit of the narrative dies and gets lost in the whole CGI-filled phantasmagoria. It leaves its viewers dumbfounded or flabbergasted (whichever fits one’s boot) depending on how you make of the abhorrent visuals and the plot dynamics between Victoria, Macavity and the Jellicle tribe.
Cats purges the soul into a different realm, a place where heaven, hell and purgatory collide and disintegrate, and scars you for life. Whether that’s for the better or for the worse, that is dependent on how the mind perceives this diabolical disaster. But make no mistake, nary is it a cinematic failure. In fact, it’s a testament to how far a director like Tom Hooper can push himself to perhaps create something no less than a widespread ruin of an otherwise acclaimed classic. Cats the film is bad. But mind you, it’s the type of bad film that leaves hope to the world as it comes from a place that is fully committed to showing and creating something above and beyond than a typical experimental nonsense or a bland Nolan twist-fest. It comes from a place that has a lot of passion (with high doses of insanity, of course), and one can never go wrong with having something as mad and as screwed up. Regardless if we’re watching Taylor Swift or James Corden make an embarrassment of themselves by dancing and singing to death, anyone who tries to deliver something that will take us out of the usual boxes that we live in on a daily basis is enough reason for Cats the film to exist and make a minuscule splinter of change in a universe that gets immediately shaken by subversion.
