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By Claudia Puig, USA TODAY
Mike Myers has never been furrier than in The Cat in the Hat.
Note that we didn't say funnier. Just furrier. Even the hairy-chested, wannabe-ladies'-man Austin Powers wasn't such an attraction as the feline star of this cinematic hairball. Like The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, an earlier holiday season's Dr. Seuss adaptation, The Cat in the Hat is long on visual dazzle but short on warmth, and the humor is excessively raunchy for a family film. But also like The Grinch, The Cat's snazzy look may be enough to make the movie a box office hit. Both prove there's more to adapting Seuss to the screen than just production design and casting a big-name comedian as the star. Seuss' books are deceptively simple. The rhyming scheme belies depth, cleverness and a slightly off-center sweetness.
Seuss is not cloying or didactic. Unfortunately, the cinematic cat is both. He tries to bring together a dysfunctional family and correct the extremist behavior of the two children (Spencer Breslin and Dakota Fanning) rather than simply being the magical playmate he was in the book. Seuss' stories value good sense and common decency. But the movie fashions forced conflicts (besides the visiting cat's proclivity for really messy fun) and adds a couple of cartoonish villains with trendy weaknesses. The absentee mom (Kelly Preston), who's also given a greater presence in this padded version, has a boss who is compulsively germ-phobic and in need of anger-management courses. Mom's suitor (Alec Baldwin) is a belching, beer-swilling, phony do-nothing who masquerades as a sensitive and hard-working guy. With a nod to today's values, filmmakers added a babysitter, who unfortunately is the movie's only major character of color. She's also a clueless, narcoleptic sycophant. And the house-centered story is expanded to scenes in the family's fantastical suburb. As silly as all the contrivances are, the real disappointment is Myers' human-size cat, who is a fast-talking, self-centered, litigious annoyance instead of the nutty, endearingly childlike fun-seeker he was on the page. Myers' thick New York accent (with undertones of Bert Lahr's Cowardly Lion) would have been put to better use with funnier lines. He tends to sound like a Cat-skills comic on a bad day. When the kids exclaim in delighted surprise that their pet fish talks, the cat snappily responds, "Yes, but is it saying anything?" Unfortunately, this movie tries to say too much, cluttering a simple but charming story with unnecessary babble, excessive plot points and extraneous characters. And it omits a key element: the book's witty, whimsical tone. |
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