Sophie Gilbert: I watched the ‘Cats’ trailer, and I have some questions

Cats is about cats, as Lloyd Webber insisted decades ago, but it’s also about the giddy joy of entering a world where the conventions of logic and narrative matter far less than sound and movement. What, you might ask, are the Jellicle cats, or the Jellicle Ball that they all attend? Just agreeable nonsense language drawn from T. S. Eliot’s poetry collection Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, which served as the lyrical inspiration for the musical. To Hooper, Jellicle seems to describe a sort of maniacal showiness: A Jellicle cat is the kind of cat that’s prone to striking exaggerated poses, wearing glitzy costumes, and singing extended songs about its own fabulously interesting personality.

The film’s story, such as it is, is told through the eyes of Victoria (played by Francesca Hayward), a newcomer to the faux-London alleys where the film is set. One by one, she meets a series of colorful strays eager to present themselves at the Jellicle Ball. There, the cats’ wise leader, Old Deuteronomy (a wonderfully committed Judi Dench), will select one of them to journey to the “Heaviside Layer” (an actual atmospheric phenomenon that here suggests some sort of reincarnation or afterlife). That’s the extent of the plot, though Hooper and his co-screenwriter, Lee Hall, have beefed up Victoria’s character from her dancing role in the original musical and added some magical nefariousness on the part of Macavity (Idris Elba), a growly playboy who is eager to triumph at the ball.

The success of Cats rests on the musical numbers, which vary wildly in terms of emotional heft and psychedelic flair. One of the first, featuring the comically lazy Jennyanydots (Rebel Wilson), is a bore as long as it’s striving for slapstick comedy; it gets more compelling when conga lines of cockroaches with human faces start marching around the house in an image straight out of Naked Lunch. Those indelible moments aside, for the first 45 minutes of Cats I found myself struggling to adjust to the absolute madness of the visuals, which are not helped by over-eager editing that chops up Andy Blankenbuehler’s impressive choreography. Jason Derulo’s work as Rum Tum Tugger is a hyperactive mess; after James Corden’s long, dull sequence as Bustopher Jones, I was ready for a catnap.

Hooper’s all-out assault on the senses eventually wore me down, however, and I came to find the sincere theater-kid energy of the project oddly charming. When Ian McKellen was introduced as the melancholy Gus the Theatre Cat, I realized I was getting emotionally invested in these bizarre creatures; by the time Skimbleshanks the Railway Cat (Steven McRae) was dancing across a CGI railroad, I was practically ready to applaud. Like Lloyd Webber’s stage show, the film has a hypnotic effect that’s difficult to explain, except to say that the whole thing is so aggressively chipper and earnest that one can’t shoo it away.