Catwoman Review
by Andrew Shellshear (shellshear AT gmail DOT com)March 23rd, 2005
Film Forensics (http://www.filmforensics.com/) film reviews specifically examine how the films may be improved.
This review assumes you have seen the film, and is full of SPOILERS.
CATWOMAN
Catwoman is an incandescently bad film, but an excellent forensic subject, which is lucky because I saw it with the express purpose of writing a Film Forensics on the subject. Caterwauls of protest rose in the streets on the night of the premiere of Catwoman, and I must admit, on reading the reviews, I licked my lips in anticipation. I had a feeling Catwoman would be bad in all the right ways, and it was.
Which is not to say that all bad films are good for dissection. Films such as Van Helsing are so decayed that they fall apart as you attempt to slice, and attempts to sew them up merely look ridiculous. But Catwoman is, for the most part, bland and uninspired. There is much we can do.
For a start, we need to make Catwoman Bad. The scriptwriters may have heard this instruction and got it confused a little: I'm sure there were notes flying around the studio for a while. The script pays lip service to the idea that Catwoman is not entirely a Good Person, and by lip service, I mean that the characters repeatedly say it, not that she actually does anything particularly Bad (apart from dress in That Costume. I don't usually make comments on costume or acting for FF, but the Catwoman costume is very, very bad, and should be immediately replaced.) Our character notes, of course, go back to the comics, the 1960's TV series, the animated TV series, and most spectacularly (to my filthy then-teenage mind), Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman in Batman Returns. To summarise the studio notes: "Catwoman is a sexy cat burgler. Selfish, vain, crush on Batman. Can we get Batman? HOW expensive? Alright, make it a cop."
Well, fair enough. These are not difficult notes to follow, and there's no reason you couldn't make a good - or at least, fun - film, following them. You just have to - and this is where Catwoman is a very instructive film - give a shit.
Because it doesn't. Care about the character of Catwoman, that is. This is, in fact, an excellent example of what happens when you don't care about character. The scriptwriters compiled a list of cliches for a Cat-Woman to say and do, and then spread them evenly throughout the film, like little turds buried in Kitty Litter. Catwoman hisses, scratches, stalks, lands on her feet, gets barked at by dogs, climbs face-first down walls, and jumps around exactly like a cheap CGI cat animated by somebody who is a firm believer in the incredible powers of cats. Actually, our CGI animator has never actually seen a cat, but from the studio notes he got, cats are pretty much like spiders, which have proven to be very profitable. Our CGI guy has been getting a lot of studio notes about spiders. One of the reasons the film is a little choppy is that they had to cut out the bits where she shoots webs out of her mouth when she hisses, and then swings from them. The lawyers said they might not be able to defend that one.
Anyway, this is as good a place as any to start making improvements. For us to care about her character and transformation, we have to do a little delving into what being Catwoman means to her. The transformation as played is a liberating experience, a second life given to her, for her to do with as she pleases. With great power comes great jewelry, apparently. Narratively, this is a bit of a problem, one that they never quite deal with successfully: she can do whatever she wants, so why bother going after her killers? Does she really seem like the kind of person driven by revenge? After she has become Catwoman, she is under no threat from her former assassins, and after being fired, has no ties to them either. What should *drive* her?
Well, there's one obvious thing they could have done, which is make the Catwoman thing both a gift and a curse. However, it seems likely they got urgent notes from the studio when "Hulk" tanked: No Id Monsters! Conflicted main characters bad! Wait, Spider-man conflicted. Me so confused! That make me mad!
And so on. No doubt, had "Hulk" done well, there would have been internal conflicts aplenty, prompting the odd conversation with her own reflection in a saucer of milk. And I think it would have been the right choice (we're still in fairly elementary Hollywood scriptwriting here, but we don't *need* to be ambitious to improve this film). A good meaty internal conflict could give us some much-needed character dynamics.
Patience starts out meek and mild and cute and klutzy, with oversized paws - sorry, I mean clothes - and great big eyes, and she's just so adorable! Yup, she's a kitten. What we need to see more of, though, is her private self, the hints of the cat that she will grow into. Firstly, she should be curious. Very curious. She can't help herself: she has to look. Perhaps she's reading a mystery novel, but can't resist looking at the last page. Her attention is attracted to slightly-opened doors, to mumbled distant conversations. The thrill of spying on the excitement she is sure other people are having. When she turns into Catwoman, she'll have ample opportunities to satisfy her curiosity: this can be one source of her internal conflicts.
We eventually want her to become selfish, a cat-like attribute that could be another good source of the internal conflict that we crave. But we want reasons for it. So let's start with her being very unselfish, but resenting it. She already gets asked to work late on a project: let's make her seethe inside about it. Perhaps an Aunt steals a favourite heirloom, a ring, claiming that Patience's mother intended it for her, not Patience. Maybe her boss pulls her up for stealing office supplies when he sees her with a work pen in her handbag. We need reasons for her to become a cat burgler, and we want the audience to understand and sympathise when she does.
That's all set up nicely. Now we have to pay a little attention to the plot, I'm afraid. The dire threat to the world: a cosmetic that does bad things to your skin if you stop using it, but makes your face hard as rock if you do, a threat that I imagine could have been borrowed from the 1960's TV series of Batman. If only they could get a woman with "Rock" somewhere in her name to play the villain! Wouldn't that be a great pun?
Still, we work with what we're given. It would help if the villain was motivated by something other than profit, as the moment that slight problem with the cosmetic was found, lawsuits would utterly destroy the company. She's the wife of the owner of the company, and has been using the product for quite some time. (By the way, it's nice, for once, to see an abomination of science that doesn't get totally out of control - she doesn't obviously have to apply the stuff more and more often, or in greater quantities, to keep its affect going, else it suddenly reverse all the anti-aging effects in one Dorien Greyish swoop.) We could have her deluded, thinking that the problems could be worked out before mass production. We could have her deliberately trying to bring the company down. Or perhaps she is planning an even more neferious scheme - cue the Batman 1960's theme music - to put a wrinkling formula into the drinking water so that women wouldn't care whether it was addictive or not: they need it. Ha! Haha! Hahahahaha! Oooooh, I'm not the right person to be writing this script either. I'm beginning to think the water-supply thing is a good idea. It doesn't make the script any more stupid than it already is, and it ups the ante. Perhaps in their research, when the company discovered the secrets of anti-wrinkling, they discovered its opposite; a wrinkling (or, aging) formula. According to movie-logic, obviously this is produced as a byproduct of producing the antiwrinkling cream. And what does the company do with byproducts? Why, they flush them out to sea, of course!
But someone has discovered what is going on! They must… die!
And that's what kills Patience. Not the fall, not drowning, but being hit by industrial quantities of wrinkling formula, so that she ends up a shrivelled up husk as she's washed to shore, like some kinda Mummy. How iconic!
Here we hit the next problem. Patience goes in, discovers the problem, doesn't see that Sharon Stone is behind all this (but we do), and gets flushed and deaded. So, the audience is way, way ahead of Patience throughout the film. It would be better, I think, to show the scene when Patience finishes redoing the ad in her apartment - before she decides to hand-deliver the ad to that warehouse - and then jump-cut to her waking up flat on her back on the rocks at the edge of the water. Let's make this a mystery for the audience, and have Patience lose her memory over that period (she's already a bit vague over that time, so this isn't too big a change). She wakes up, confused, and tries to piece together what has happened to her, gradually discovers her mysterious powers, gets fired, and so on. We can reveal bits of that evening in flashbacks as the movie progresses. This gives her a little more in-character motivation to stay with the plot.
Here's where the changes begin to frighten her. She wants to be nice, but the naughty side just wants to come out. She's suddenly selfish and enjoys it. She does more things for herself, but occasionally, when she lets herself go, it scares her. Like when she starts stealing things. Little things at first - paying a night visit to her Aunt to retrieve her mother's ring - but then, after admiring a beautiful egyptian bracelet in a shop window, one night she suddenly finds herself in the store, in the act of stealing it. And on the ferris wheel, when the child is in peril, she is scared to realise that the only reason she saves the child is to show off to her boyfriend. The story is about her coming to terms with her Catwoman self; not letting it overwhelm her, but tempering it with her nicer side.
And about discovering, along with us, that it was Ms Stone who was the villain all along. The plot moves forward: Catwoman investigates the cosmetics company, and runs into the dead body of the chief scientist. She suspects the head of the company, and goes to confront him, but *he* turns up dead too. It's a little ridiculous to keep the launch of the cosmetic on schedule even after the chief scientist and founder of the company have been murdered, one *the day before the launch*, so perhaps after our villain has killed her husband and framed Catwoman, Catwoman manages to escape, though not without injury. She hides out from the police, licking her wounds. Literally. That's a studio note.
In this time, Patience has a crisis of confidence about being Catwoman. Her curiosity has taken her too far. Her boyfriend suspects her, she's on the run, this Catwoman lark is No Fun. *Now* it's time for her to meet the owner of the cats, who can explain to her that she *died* - that's the only way she could have become Catwoman. More memories return now, as they are wont to do. She remembers seeing the side-effects of the cosmetics, and realises that her friend in hospital is suffering from the cosmetic withdrawal, her face getting dry and cracked and horrible. She'll need those cosmetics for the rest of her life, or until a cure is found. It's time for revenge!
So when she goes back to stop the launch of the cosmetics, it is, for the first time, with her full powers realised, Patience at peace with her Catwoman self. The climax. And the villain's big reveal is that stopping the delivery vans isn't enough - the wrinkling formula is pumping into the sea, and soon people will be clamouring for her cosmetic cream, regardless of side-effects. Only now do we get the revelation that the wrinkling formula is what killed Patience, not the fall and drowning (which is what she had previously assumed). And so, the big fight.
I don't know about you, but I didn't feel particularly scared for Catwoman's life when she's hanging out the window of the skyscraper. We've already seen her take implausibly high falls. Certainly, you could argue that this fall would be just too high, but you have to admit, it takes away from the threat a bit. No, the ideal threat - and comeuppance for the villain - is for her to be poised above a vat of the wrinkling formula. Or perhaps Catwoman is in the pipes, once more, where Patience was flushed, and the villains decide to do the same trick again. However, this time it doesn't work. Catwoman messes with the flow controls, and the wrinkling formula ends up bursting the pipes and spraying all over the villain.
And that's all we have time for. I've passed over her relationship with the cop, although it could use a little work, and there's plenty more replotting we could do, but this is plenty for a second draft. The character of Catwoman has enough promise to spawn an interesting film some day, and no doubt in another thirty years time, we'll see another treatment. If Hollywood is still doing its thing then, we may see a repeat of the uninventive blandness of this film, but there's one bright side. At least the CGI will be better.
Copyright 2005 by Andrew Shellshear
http://www.filmforensics.com/autopsy/2005/03/22/catwoman/
Originally posted in the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup. Copyright belongs to original author unless otherwise stated. We take no responsibilities nor do we endorse the contents of this review.
