Why is it so hard to love Dreamgirls? It s impossible not to like it maybe like it a lot, admire it, even announce that, here and there, smidgens of Bill Condon s long-awaited Broadway adaptation are nothing less than overpowering, breathtaking in the literal sense of the word. I saw the film a month or so ago, and sometimes reactions change with time, but my initial reaction remains: I didn t love it because I saw how incredible it could be.
Two simple reasons:
No. 1, Jennifer Hudson.
No. 2, Eddie Murphy.
Hudson delivers the show-stopper no matter what follows in this lukewarm review, see Dreamgirls if only to see her performance. (It opens tomorrow in Toledo.) It s worth $10 and more, one of those transcendent moments where your hair stands on end and goose bumps form. (A couple in the theater, seriously, stood and applauded at the end of said show-stopper.) And Murphy, playing a sly variation on James Brown and Jackie Wilson and dozens of unbridled R&B performers who found it hard to break from the Chitlin Circuit into the mainstream suggests depths of hurt and resolve he s never shown, along with an energy he hasn t allowed to peek through in two decades.
The guy s never been so alive.
The problem with show-stoppers, however, is that a production has to work overtime to top it. It puts you on constant lookout for the next peak (while reminding you of the valleys all the more.) A good one literally will stop a show. The problem (rather, one of a few problems) with Dreamgirls, as entertaining as it can be, is it never recovers from Hudson and Murphy s performances, it never stops giving a superficial tour of music history to linger long on the heartache it s meant to dig into. Of course, it is an adaptation, a blueprint that requires tracing.
But when they re not around, you wonder when they re coming back perhaps because, as an adaptation of a Broadway musical loosely based on Motown, there s a paradox. Its music (by nature, by the standards of modern Broadway musicals) can t hope to match the gut-bucket soul of the sound ( the sound of young America ) it is celebrating. When it comes closest is the number Hudson will now be famous for as Jennifer Holliday was, on a much smaller scale, when she originated the part of Effie White 25 years ago.
Ironically, Hudson is already famous for being booted early from American Idol; and in a few months, when she wins the Oscar for best supporting actress, Vanity Fair will be next infamous blunderer, for leaving her off its recent cover, which pictures Murphy, Jamie Foxx, and Beyonce an act of ugliness richer than even the film itself delivers.
For anyone who isn t familiar with Dreamgirls, the story is roughly based on Diana Ross and the Supremes and specifically, a music industry (indeed, a pop culture, and an audience) that rewards beauty over talent. The story of the Supremes is actually sadder. Ross replaced Florence Ballard, who founded the Supremes in 1961 (as the Primettes). They signed to Motown and the label s Svengali, Berry Gordy Jr., eventually removed Ballard from lead vocals, citing Ross movie-star looks (despite a weaker voice) as a chance for the group to hit the mainstream (read: white) charts.
Ballard was dropped from the group, and unlike Effie, she died in poverty. She was 32. To be fair, we don t really know what happens to Effie. There s a reconciliation, but you re dying to know how Diana Ross herself is reading all this if the Broadway show wasn t especially subtle with its comparisons, this one drops every last hint of coyness.
Effie (Hudson) is the true leader of the Dreamettes, but having a voice to contend with, she balks when the group is asked to be backup singers for the swaggering James Thunder Early (Murphy). But they agree because their own impresario, a Detroit car salesman named Curtis (Foxx), has bigger plans. He makes them the Dreams, then goes about shuffling the line-up Effie s robust growl must now sit beneath the light (more accessible) voice of Deena (Beyonce Knowles, quite the sport) who is thin where Effie is thick and prime for shaping, where Effie has her sound.
She has a mind of her own.
She pays the price.
Which brings us to the show-stopper in question which was the show-stopper on Broadway, And I Am Telling You I m Not Going. Bill Condon is not the director for a film like this. He made Gods and Monsters and Kinsey, and regardless of the disparate subject matter, there s a similar chill (an awkward blockiness) to the way he arranges characters on screen who are meant to be familiar (at least) to each other. That said, there s also sincere love for the theatrics and emotional quasi-operatics of big-budget musicals. Condon was Oscar-nominated for writing the adaptation of Chicago, and there s a similar brisk efficiency at work when a number arrives.
The number is the thing.
And it doesn t get bigger than And I Am Telling You I m Not Going. Effie has been dumped. She has been replaced in the bedroom (cruelly, by Deena, as well). The movie, like the stage show, never makes clear why a singer of such talent could not find work. But let s not be naive. Hudson latches on to the pain in this number with a force that (with no disrespect to her acting ability) cannot be pure acting. She is humiliated, wounded, defeated. She is going. She is going down hard, and the irony is that Hudson, surrounded by an A-list cast, comes out of it much taller.
But there s a better reason you can t shake that number out of your head or the moving downward trajectory of Murphy s Thunder. It has soul. This is a film about soul, specifically about the soul being driven from music as the Dreams ascend the pop charts, as scruffy R&B turns into processed disco, how manager Curtis becomes a man without conscience. But the film, and especially the music, notably lacks a heart, a thump. Condon does right by the pop opera of big Broadway musicals he does his job but that s a compromise that clangs hard against the subject and its ambitions.
In short, the music is bad.
I m sorry. It s terrible. The performances may overcome the blah overdone arrangements (four new songs, a handful of old tunes which haven t aged well I m reminded of bland, synthetic tunes former Motown superstars were releasing late into the 80s, long after the magic had faded).
But we re talking a movie set in Detroit, and not without a good reason. There is archival footage of the Civil Rights Movement and the 1968 riots. The music is meant to mirror social change, upheaval, even the appropriation of black artists songs by white artists (who, in turn, would land a bigger hit, leaving the black artist unknown). I saw the stage show when I was young, but I don t remember the historical context Condon uses or the connections between musical change and racial integration being quite as smart.
He s not wrong to go out on a limb indeed, that s a pretty standard approach to the evolution of soul. But when the music itself doesn t evolve, even barely change from decade to decade are we still talking about Motown? Or Broadway? Or the trouble with bringing the musical to the big screen? Beyonce would have been comfortable in old movie musicals; she s distant until a song begins, then a switch is thrown and personality emerges. Foxx is more of a mystery: He drifts through scenes, playing pure evil but never the satisfaction that, at least business-wise, everyone may hate him but with every new sound, he s been prescient.
There s been a lot of anticipation for Dreamgirls. It was short-listed early for the Best Picture Oscar before anyone had seen it. So maybe some let-down is inevitable. The big movie musicals of recent years, the few that have dared, have all been adaptations of successful Broadway shows, like Rent and Chicago and Phantom of the Opera. But it s not just that the music, in most instances, is too corny for moviegoers, or we can t stand it when characters pop into song.
It s that it s nothing new.
By the time a show makes it to the screen, the music has molted and the aura of Broadway is too strong to take any radical liberties. And so Dreamgirls is made by talented people with weights around their necks though to cast it off would be the gutsiest move of all. It s what Eddie Murphy does. It s what Jennifer Hudson does.
Contact Christopher Borrelli at: cborrelli@theblade.com or 419-724-6117.
First Published December 24, 2006, 11:19 a.m.
