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. 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.
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