Or so I thought Catwoman would be. It was not.
I didn't exactly like the movie -- 2.5 stars on Letterboxd was the highest I would go -- but neither did I find it the laughingstock it was supposed to have been, the kind of movie I knew I would eventually watch just to howl in disbelief at its miscalculations.
I actually did laugh at the movie a couple times. There are some clumsy bits. But really, it's not so terrible at all. There are one or two goofy moments with Halle Berry's performance, but overall I think she's fine. There are a few times when the editing is a little bit off. Some of the visual effects don't look great, but then again some of them do. I actually think the way they have Berry leaping around like a cat is mostly pretty effective.
So now I am trying to think why critics at the time thought it was so awful, or whether it was just that audiences didn't go, which drove the narrative that it was bad. I'm not going to do a deep dive into the 2004 Catwoman reviews to answer my question. Rather, I will put forward some theories of what it was that might have turned a fickle critic against it, leading audiences to follow suit and similarly shun it.
1) It was directed by a man named Pitof. Some people get instantly annoyed when they see that a director has chosen a nickname or a pseudonym as the way they are professionally credited, such as McG or Tarsem. Then again, I haven't met anyone who is annoyed by the name Kogonada, so I don't know. (Pitof was born Jean-Christophe Comar, and I guess Pitof is a nickname.) Well, any Pitof haters got their wish as he never got to direct another feature film after this one flopped.
2) There's a really tiresome opening credits sequence that lasts for seemingly five minutes, which takes place over ancient Egyptian depictions of cats, other cats throughout history, newspaper headlines in which cats appear, and then, comically, what also appears to be pictures of modern-day housecats. The credits are not fatal to the success of the film, but it's conceivable they put some critics in a bad mood from which they never recovered. In any case, I am reminded why most superhero films don't have opening credits any more, just the title and the name of the production companies.
3) As I said, there are a few times I found the editing off a bit. The editing is by Sylvie Landra, who worked on some of Luc Besson's earliest films, which I believe were fine in terms of their editing. Maybe Pitof steered her in the wrong direction. Again, though, I only really noticed this in the opening 15 minutes of the movie, when I still thought it was going to be a disaster.
4) It's the first -- and so far last -- on-screen depiction of the character that does not involve Batman or appear to take place in Gotham City. This is Patience Phillips, not Selena Kyle, and I just confirmed on Wikipedia that the story they've chosen does not appear to spring from the comics in any specific way. The movie was originally envisioned as more directly related to the Catwoman we had already met in Batman Returns, with both Tim Burton and Michelle Pfeiffer involved, but that idea from the mid-90s morphed into this one from 2004. Clearly the final film did not benefit from the delay.
5) Racism, maybe? Although Halle Berry has had crossover appeal the entire time she's been famous -- in other words, her race never prevented people from all quarters declaring how beautiful she was and ranking her alongside more traditionally praised white beauties -- you can't discount the idea that some critics might have thought this was some early incarnation of woke culture and they didn't like it.
6) The scene where a digital cat breathes upon Patience's dead body, thereby giving her the powers of Catwoman, is, indeed, downright laughable.
I had a peek on Wikipedia at a sampling of the critical response at the time, and Roger Ebert at least talked about the character's lack of strength and agency -- I'm not sure I agree with that -- as well as the way they accentuate Berry's appearance and sexuality through the way she's shot and costumed. I guess I have to agree with the second one. Setting aside all my own woke credentials for a moment, this part didn't bother me because I really enjoyed looking at her. She has kind of the most perfectly designed face and cheekbones I've ever seen.
Although Catwoman is not necessarily a movie anyone should be "proud of," it's not nearly the misfire I expected it to be, and I'm wondering if those involved with it got on board as quickly as they could with the critical disdain for it, in order to be on the right side of history as soon as they could. Berry herself described it, only semi-sarcastically, as a "piece of shit, fucking godawful movie." I wonder if she really felt that way or just wanted to wrest control of the narrative surrounding it as decisively as she could.
As soon as I started to realize I didn't hate Catwoman, I of course interrogated that feeling and tried to see what was wrong with me that I couldn't summon the 2004 critics' and audiences' extreme dislike. And my brain went to a moment on a podcast that I listened to sometime within the past year -- presumably a discussion of The Batman -- where some critic came tepidly to the film's defense. I can't remember exactly what he said, but it was something to the effect of Catwoman being "misunderstood" at the time. That was probably as close as he could come to admitting a slight affection for it, without his own critical credibility suffering.
Interestingly, I'm pretty sure this critic was Black.
And maybe that's the cruelest thing about the resounding rejection of Catwoman in 2004: It was one of the first superhero movies where a person of color was permitted to occupy the starring role. Looking back from where we find ourselves in 2022, the glee critics had in trashing the movie seems problematic. Even if many of them appeared to have praised Berry herself, that might have only been an attempt to avoid looking problematic, something that would have already been possible in 2004, if obviously not to the same extent as today.
Interestingly, I think if Catwoman were released in 2022 -- some of the visual effects still look pretty good -- it would receive a far different reception. It might still not be hailed as a great movie -- it isn't a great movie -- but I think we would be more careful in how we discussed it, and I think some of the things the film was trying to do would now be a bit more heartily embraced. Now granted, some of those things were themselves problematic, like Berry's skin-tight outfits. But maybe some of its gestures toward representation were, indeed, keenly considered and successfully realized. You can't say Catwoman was ahead of its time, but maybe you can say we as a society were behind the times back then.
I definitely watched it because I wanted a laugh. But I have to be honest when I say that the film didn't inspire the guffaws that I wanted, and by the time I got to the end of it, I wished I hadn't wanted them in the first place.
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