Waking Up

Dreamgirls is hardly the stuff of fantasy.

by Sam Adams

As we're reminded about a zillion times during the course of Dreamgirls, everybody has a dream. If we're to believe the movie's advance press, Bill Condon's was bringing this cultishly adored 1981 musical to the screen. Securing the rights apparently meant convincing fellow true believer David Geffen that he'd first and foremost do right by the stage production, which may be why, despite Condon's rather desperate and fumbling attempts to seem cinematic, the movie of Dreamgirls never finds a shape of its own.

The story's spine is the rise and fall of a 1960s girl group called the Dreamettes, obviously, though not scrupulously, modeled after The Supremes. Beyoncé Knowles plays Deena Jones, who eventually rises to prominence as the lead singer of Deena and the Dreams. But for the movie's first half, Knowles is literally and figuratively eclipsed by Jennifer Hudson as the Dreams' Effie White, the deep-lunged belter who eventually proves insufficiently pliable, not to mention too physically robust, to be the figurehead of the Dreams' crossover success.

At its core, Dreamgirls is the story of the Faustian bargain of '60s soul, the way R&B impresarios like Motown's Berry Gordy — here incarnated as Curtis Taylor Jr. (Jamie Foxx), a slick wheeler-dealer who goes from owning an auto dealership to ruling a recording empire — spruced up and smoothed down African-American music to make it palatable to a white audience. There's a telling, if typically overstated, cut from the Dreams performing their first potential hit to an insipid Pat Boone type crooning a sickly, syrup version of the same tune (although it's typical of the movie's historical hodgepodge that the singer is flanked by girls in swimwear and costumed to resemble one of the Beach Boys, who were hardly known for appropriating black songs or styles).

Eventually, Gordy decided he had to beat the white-owned record companies at their own game, the crucial difference being that instead of simply replacing black performers with white ones, he found a way to repackage and refit black music and performance without losing its essence, in the process creating an essentially new strain of music. There were those who didn't fit the new mold, and they were left behind. Unlike Dreamgirls' Effie, who pulls herself up by the bootstraps for a triumphant third-act return, The Supremes' original lead singer, Florence Ballard, died in poverty at the age of 32.

Of course, when you listen to Motown these days, you don't hear any of that: You hear pure, smooth thrill, with just a hint of grit underneath. But when you listen to Dreamgirls, all you hear is Broadway schmaltz, a feeble simulacrum of funk that only gets at Motown's glossy surface. In an early montage, we peek inside the recording studio Curtis has built inside his former dealership, and see a percussionist shaking a fistful of chains to add a metallic glint to "Cadillac Car," a nod to Gordy's ceaselessly inventive production sound. But you can only hear the chains when they're on camera; the sound is instantly drowned out by a tidal wave of ersatz soul.

IN THE SPOTLIGHT: Anika Noni Rose, Beyonce Knowles and Jennifer Hudson as The Dreams.

It falls to the performers, then, to cut through the muck of Henry Krieger and Tom Eyen's songs, which happens only on rare occasions. The most dramatic, of course, is Hudson's roof-shaking performance of "I Am Telling You I'm Not Going," a swelling escalation of force that builds to a white-hot intensity. The number, the best-known by far of the original musical, follows a through-sung confrontation in which it emerges that Effie has been booted from the Dreams, and that Deena has been sleeping with Curtis, who once proclaimed his allegiance to Effie's womanly curves. The song's lyrics are defiant, almost illogically so; Effie's already gone, whether she admits it or not. But as it's staged here, the triumphant number feels more like a nervous breakdown, a dying-diva moment to rival anything in A Star Is Born. Hudson, previously best known as an early-round expulsee from American Idol, is a competent if not exceptional actress when she's speaking, but a powerhouse in song; even as she proclaims she's staying put, you can feel her falling apart.

Even better, though less hyped due to his antagonism toward the entertainment press, is Eddie Murphy, as a veteran soul singer named James "Thunder" Early who gets swept up in Curtis' plans. Alone among the movie's singers, Murphy draws flawlessly on the idiom of the times, sounding at first like a gravelly Wilson Pickett, later like a suave Johnny Taylor. Murphy's character has his own downslide, exacerbated when Curtis rejects his recording of a protest anthem as an impediment to the label's uncontroversial image. But again, Murphy acts better in song than in speech, showing an astonishing versatility and range.

The fact that Dreamgirls isn't a particularly good movie seems mainly to stem from the fact that it isn't a particularly good show, but a good share of the blame has to fall on director Bill Condon, who previously directed Kinsey and Gods and Monsters, and wrote the screenplay for Chicago. Taking a leaf from Chicago director Rob Marshall's folio, Condon never uses one cut where five will do, ceaselessly chopping and hacking with such unrelieved aggression that the movie never develops its own rhythm. Matters only get worse in the movie's second half, when Hudson is largely sidelined and the focus shifts to Knowles' Deena, who fully embodies Curtis' dream of a malleable, essentially empty vessel for stardom. During a romantic spat late in the game, he says he picked her to lead the Dreams not because she was the prettiest or the most talented, but because she had "no personality." Typecasting strikes again.

(sam@citypaper.net)

Dreamgirls

Written and Directed by Bill CondonA Dreamworks releaseOpens Dec. 25 at area theaters