When Andrew Lloyd Webber and Trevor Nunn adapted T.S. Eliot’s “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats” (a series of poems) to the theatrical dance spectacle where a succession of feline characters sing about themselves, they weren’t thinking of filmic dramatic coherence. The faint plot was that these cats were competing for a chance to go to the Heaviside Layer – cat heaven – where the lucky cat will be reborn into a new-life. Yet, decades later a film adaptation of the musical which seemed so inherently stage-bound arrived in theatres at the end of 2019 – a wildly ambitious venture, for good and for ill.
I’ll give credit to Tom Hooper, who directs as well as co-writes the script along with Lee Hall. The adaptation of the musical’s slim libretto from stage to screen is the best possible version I can imagine. On film, the story hinges on a newcomer to the parading cats – a white cat Victoria – with little knowledge of the madness to come. She serves as the audience surrogate, precipitating the imminent immersion in this bizarre world of hyper-realistic and (hypersexual) cats with stories that touch on prostitution, addiction, greed and shame. It’s still thin on plot, but with at least some dramatic stakes. But, “Cats” doesn’t rest on its story in film or stage form – it’s the uncanny valley of the digital work mixing cat features with human actor and antics that have been the most notable thing about the film. On stage, the actors paraded in cat-costumes; on film, Hooper and his team favour special effects that take some getting used to and which have been the death knell for its critical success. Ambitious, certainly, but also slightly perverse.
Visually, nothing in “Cats” reaches the nightmarish proportions that the worst of the critics insist it instils. There’s enough care and thoughtfulness in the best of the digitisation to be excellent – work on a magical cat Mr. Mistoffelees and the stalwart Munkustrap are genuinely exciting to watch. But, the bad character work is especially glaring, particularly when they feature on two of the more prominent actors. Idris Elba and Jennifer Hudson, both turning in rocky performances, suffer from some garish design work on their characters that always seem out of place with the rest of the design on the film, which is, for the most part, fine. Not always spectacular, but generally fair. (Considering I saw the film at the end of its brief run in local theatres, it’s possible I saw an improved version, since in an unusual move – the film sent new copies with improved effects, after the film had been in theatres for a few days.)
And, it’s a shame that the things beyond the digitisation have been swallowed by the conversation on the way the cats look. There’s a sincere care to the craft and production of “Cats” that make me sympathetic to a project that’s misguided in intent, but seamless in some production merits. The set and production design are genuinely thoughtful, playing around with perspective in interesting ways, and the sound design (essential for any musical) is impressive and clean – the best directed sequence in the film is a tap-number in a railway station that looks and sounds excellently, and is a truly exuberant piece of filmmaking. Stage performer Robbie Fairchild, as the very-serious Munkustrap, turns in a performance with a talent for screen performance that makes curious to see him in something where he’s properly visible. It doesn’t help the film, though, that Jennifer Hudson, playing the cat with the film’s most famous song ‘Memory’, is giving the weakest performance.
This is inconsistent stuff, surely, but “Cats” is also rewarding enough in bursts of passion that make it a genuinely intriguing experience. There are things to think about and dig into here that go beyond the surface level, and it’s the kind of ambitiously bizarre misfire that I appreciate – something with an actual vision and a clear idea of something to achieve.
‘Diminishing returns’
The same cannot be said of “Just Mercy”, despite the polite reception it has incurred. The first ninety minutes of Destin Daniel Cretton’s film features some of the most tedious filmmaking of 2019. It is blunt, it is unambitious, it is repetitive and it harbours not a shred of trust for the intelligence of its audience.
The film paints a picture of 1980s American anti-black racism that we are familiar with – a legal system that sees blackness as a mark of criminality. Bryan Stevenson, a young, black Harvard graduate, is moved to right the wrongs of the world by moving to Alabama to help the many men on death-row without proper representation. He takes on the case of Walter McMillian, a man put on death-row a year before his trial, and convicted of killing an 18-year old white girl on the testimony of a white-convict. It’s anger-inducing stuff telling an important “the world is terrible” tale that is all too applicable to 2020, but that sense of righteous anger we get watching Bryan fight for Walter’s freedom is something we could get watching a news clip or reading an essay about this tale. It’s no surprise that the film is based on Bryan Stevenson’s nonfiction book. None of the anger of the story justifies the existence of “Just Mercy” as a piece of cinema, though. Instead the film, staid and blank, represents some of the worst inclinations of what proffers to be good filmmaking.
The idea seemed more pointed seeing this a day after the wild, but ambitious “Cats”. It’s not just that “Just Mercy” isn’t doing anything new with the medium – newness is not essential to vale. But little in the film’s script or direction has any thoughtful perspective or intention beyond leadenly presenting the “this is an awful world for black people” of the main theme. It doesn’t help that Michael B Jordan, as Bryan Stevenson, completely buckles under the pressures of the film’s limitations. This type of character-work isn’t his strong suit as a performer, and the film already isn’t giving him much to play around with. The film is built around his journey from novice to hero, but it’s a case of diminishing returns when despite all the earnest close-ups, Jordan’s face can telegraph little beyond the superficial.
But superficiality runs beyond just the main actor. In a film scrambling for depth and nuance, Rob Morgan, playing a doomed inmate, is the best in show by far, doing a lot with the very little around him. Further afield, Karan Kendrick is doing strong character work on the edges of the film as Walter’s wife. But, most of what’s left – performers and craft alike – seem to be working at a level of inoffensive automation that’s unremarkable. There’s not a single image in this film that announces itself as a vibrant representation of what cinema can do. The cinematography has no keen understanding of what period the film is in, the makeup work inexplicably makes McMillian look cleaner before he’s been on death town for years.
“Just Mercy” isn’t the first, or the last, of this kind of assembly-line filmmaking serving to dutifully put a serious issue on-screen, but juxtaposed by the critically evisceration of the other film I saw to break the new year it made me despondent at what we value in art. As a whole “Just Mercy” does little to justify its existence in this medium. Cretton is a filmmaker with sensibilities stronger than this (his “Short Term 12” in 2013 was a genuine and thoughtful independent film). It’s all a matter of taste, but it becomes depressing the way that rote, banalities like this keep being politely applauded for the bare minimum and we keep saving up contempt for weird, messy, strange things.
“Just mercy” is currently playing at all local theatres.
