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When it came to devising the voice he would use for “Lincoln,” Daniel Day-Lewis spent months working out the precise timbre and inflection and rhythm of how he imagined Abraham Lincoln might have sounded. (The day he presented
his Lincoln voice to Steven Spielberg, it felt momentous, as if the actor were unveiling a skyscraper he had designed.) All of which got me to thinking about the voice Daniel Day-Lewis might have used to play the Cat in the Hat. Reading the Dr. Seuss books as a kid, I always imagined the Cat in the Hat sounding vaguely aristocratic, a touch effete, with the edgy attitude of a blithe troublemaker. He was consciously obnoxious, though part of it is that he knew there was nothing really wrong with the mischief he was making. It was what every kid wanted and needed.
We’ll never know how Daniel Day-Lewis would have voiced the Cat in the Hat. But I’m pretty sure that if he took on the role, he’d have made the Cat more spiky and audacious, less safe, more cut with personality, more…Cat in the Hat-like than Bill Hader does.
In the new digitally animated “The Cat in the Hat,” Hader, who is one of the film’s executive producers, doesn’t stumble into the black hole of misjudgment that Mike Myers did back in 2003, when he starred in a live-action “The Cat in the Hat” — a noisy, antic hairball of a movie, made in the shadow of Jim Carrey’s “How the Grinch Stole Christmas.” Myers gave the Cat a New Yawk snarl that made him sound like he’d come out of a ’60s Catskills resort. (I guess he figured if he could make a green ogre Scottish, he could do anything.) Myers, in his Cat costume, also looked like a marshmallow with teeth, which was more scary than inviting. Hader plays the Cat as capital-F Friendly, which “works,” but it’s also a bit of a letdown. You can feel the film working too hard to turn him into an ingratiating mascot.
I guess you could say that Alessandro Carloni and Erica Rivinoja, the writer-directors of “The Cat in the Hat,” have avoided the earlier version’s pitfalls. But only enough to make some major mistakes of their own. The new “Cat in the Hat,” it goes without saying at this point, makes no attempt to be a faithful adaptation of Dr. Seuss’s most fabled books. That would simply be too quaint for our buzzy, mercurial, attention-crashing, video-games-on-Ritalin era. Yet even as the movie departs all too eagerly from the innocent wildness of the Seuss books, it devotes itself, with a corporate diligence that’s the opposite of free-spirited, to mimicking the scale and spirit and plot setups of too many familiar blockbusters. From Pixar to “Minions” to “The Emoji Movie,” it’s a mish-mosh of pop recycling.
Thus, the teenage heroine, Gabby (voiced by Xochitl Gomez), who has just moved to a new city with her little brother, Sebastian (Tiago Martinez), and their single mom, Carmen (America Ferrera), is sad and lonely and alienated from her new surroundings in the exact mode of Riley, the heroine of “Inside Out.” Gabby is a trumpet player who doesn’t want to be a “band nerd” anymore. But when the Cat appears, looking to stir up some anarchic action, she sprays him with Mace. For a good while, he doesn’t exactly win over Gabby or Sebastian or their fussy British goldfish, Waffles (Matt Berry), whose ire at the Cat’s shenanigans is one of the few things the film preserves directly from the original book.
The family’s unpacked stuff includes three sealed-up cardboard boxes (one for every family member), and each of these packages of memorabilia becomes a literal portal to another world. We thought we were watching a “Cat in the Hat” movie, but we’re really watching a Marvel movie for tots, one that gets fused with a Pixar mash-up. The guiding spirit of “The Cat in the Hat” is bigger, louder, more erupting with gadgets and flimflam and paraphernalia, not to mention a glowy-eyed giant leaping demon monster.
At one point we meet Thing One and Thing Three, though not Thing Two (there’s a surprise reason he’s not there), the Cat in the Hat’s fabled small assistants, in their unruly blue-flame hair and red pajamas. They don’t speak — but in this movie, they communicate by clapping and clucking their tongues and tapping on themselves, as if they were the Bobby McFerrin percussion section. Are they fun? In a one-note meh sort of way. But as soon as the movie makes a meta joke about them having their own franchise, you realize where this is going. It turns out that there are more than three Things (there’s a whole clan of them), and if you suspect that the corporate powers that be told the filmmakers 1) you’re going to be moving merchandise, and 2) if you do it right, we’re talking the new Minions…the evidence for that is all over the screen. But these born-to-be-franchise-plush-toys are more cuddly than hilarious.
“The Cat in the Hat” is junior Marvel surrealism, but it’s also a de facto video-game movie dreamed up for a game that doesn’t exist: The Cat in the Hat Saves The Universe. The Cat starts out as an office drone, who works for a massive company that assigns him clients; his job is to perk up their spirits. He winds up raiding the Supply Closet, a veritable city of shelved detritus, all of which — even a grand piano — he stores in his hat, à la Mary Poppins’ magic carpet bag.
The Cat is an irresponsible worker who regularly racks up too high a score on the Mess-o-Meter. (Can you hear Dr. Seuss grinding his teeth?) But he has brought a singular object with him: a Go-Backer, which is a layered stopwatch that allows one to turn back time. Gabby thinks they can use it to go back to the hometown she misses. But first a plunge into those boxes, and a ride on their old red couch that turns into a protean motorized vehicle. They go under the sea, in an episode filled with creatures like a school of swimming underwear and an operatic whale with a plastic-rainbow unicorn horn. There’s a circus, a marching band playing “Shake It Off,” and other random diversions, all leading up to the battle with the monster known as the Something, who’s a gloss on Te Kā in “Moana.” All in all, I would give “The Cat in the Hat” about a 70 on the Mess-o-Meter — it “delivers,” but in a hectic, bumptious, overcrowded and underfelt way. It’s a kids’ fantasy that’s talking through its hat.
