Dreamgirls
Oof! You can say a lot of things about “Dreamgirls,” many of them laudatory, but you can’t call it effortless. Writer-director Bill Condon is hard at work, and it shows. He knows he’s a generation or two late to make a straightforward Hollywood musical, and he’s clearly terrified that its conventions can seem anathema to contemporary audiences, so he push, push, pushes it forward, crosscutting and intercutting and moving the camera constantly throughout the musical numbers. That way, he posits, maybe you won’t mind that the characters are expressing their feelings and propelling the story through song. Since I adore musicals, I wouldn’t have minded anyway, so Condon’s earnest busybody style, to me, feels overwrought. Especially since “Dreamgirls” is never better than when it simply puts Jennifer Hudson in front of the camera and lets her wail. “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going” is as wondrous as advertised, an earth-shaking lament. Hudson, an “American Idol” also-ran, has been touted as the show-stealer, and she is, but it’s not like everybody else stinks. True, she has the biggest, brassiest, heart-stoppingest voice, but she also gets the best songs, and her character has by far the most involving arc. “Dreamgirls,” for all its sprawling melodrama, truly is her story, and it might have been sharper and punchier if Condon had trimmed the stretches when she disappears from the action.
Then again, Condon’s ambition is part of what makes “Dreamgirls” so impressive. It’s brassy and glitzy and, crucially, it pulsates with authentic emotion despite the artifice of the genre. As it whisks the audience through a thinly veiled chronicle of the rise of Diana Ross and the Supremes, it captures the excitement, the backstage intrigue and the soul-draining compromises that accompanied African-American music’s crossover to white listeners. “Dreamgirls” is never funnier or more piercing than when it shows how “Cadillac Car,” a propulsive, sexy ode to conspicuous consumption, loses all its verve when a buttoned-down Caucasian crooner re-records it. Even whites are ready for something a little edgier, the movie shows, but Curtis Taylor Jr. (Jamie Foxx), manager of the Dreams (Hudson, Beyoncé Knowles, Anika Noni Rose), understands the limits of commercial viability. He’s not interested in challenging or provocative music, and when you’re working with genuine artists, that’s a sure recipe for alienating everyone around you. “Dreamgirls” chronicles Curtis’s creation of a wildly successful musical “family” and its dissolution, which springs largely from his refusal to loosen his grip with time. At first, the Dreams need his discipline, but he suffocates them when he should allow them to blossom. Effie White (Hudson) is the first to go, shunted aside in favor of the lovelier, less talented, more marketable Deena Jones (Knowles), both as the Dreams’ lead singer and as Curtis’s lover. Others to wither when confronted with Curtis’s intransigence are Effie’s brother, C.C. (Keith Robinson) and the James Brown analog, James “Thunder” Early (Eddie Murphy, who performs with enthusiasm and charisma but not much soul). The only one who can successfully stand up to him is Deena, and Knowles does a fine job suggesting the steely resolve and genuine passion to perform lurking beneath Deena’s malleable voice and face.
The sheer professionalism and glossy showmanship of “Dreamgirls” are thrilling. Like “Chicago” (also a Condon project — he wrote the screenplay), it reasserts the viability of the movie musical as a draw for audiences and as a form with still-untapped artistic potential. Both are honorable efforts — “Dreamgirls” is better; it’s by far the more substantive — but both have obvious flaws. I think many of the problems stem from the fact that neither was originally conceived for the screen; both are adaptations of Broadway shows, and both suffer from the awkward transition from one medium to the other. One sign that reports of the musical’s rebirth may be premature is that so many of them are recycled — movie musicals adapted from Brodway and Broadway musicals from the movies. There have even been two titles — “The Producers” and “Hairspray” — that started as non-musical films and became stage musicals only to have the shows adapted into movie musicals. It’s dizzying. That’s why I think the best recent musical is “Moulin Rouge,” because, whether you love or hate Baz Luhrmann’s frenetic style and simplistic, cheap-seats melodrama, his song-and-dance spectacle was a movie to the bone.