Dreamgirls
Written and directed by Bill Condon
Paramount
2006
Rating:


A movie that does cinematic justice to the story of Motown Records would have to be 10 hours long in order to fully explore the founding of Motown; its musical and historical importance, especially in the context of African American history; the epochal sound it produced; the recording and performances of such phenomenal songs as "(Money) That's What I Want," "Shop Around," "Please Mr. Postman," "You've Really Got a Hold on Me," "(Love is Like a) Heat Wave," "The Way You Do the Things You Do," "My Guy," "Devil with a Blue Dress," "Baby I Need Your Loving," "Dancing in the Street," "Needle in a Haystack," "Baby Love," "How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You)," "My Girl," "Shotgun," "Nowhere to Run," "Ooo Baby Baby," "I Can't Help Myself (Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch)," "The Tracks of My Tears," "It's the Same Old Song," "Uptight (Everything's Alright)," "This Old Heart of Mine (Is Weak for You)," "Roadrunner (I'm a)," "Ain't to Proud to Beg," "What Becomes of the Brokenhearted," "You Can't Hurry Love," "Reach Out I'll Be There," "It Takes Two," "Ain't No Mountain High Enough," "I Heard It Through the Grapevine," "I Second That Emotion," "Ain't Nothing Like the Real Thing," "I Want You Back," "ABC," "Signed, Sealed, Delivered I'm Yours," "War," "The Tears of a Clown," "If I Were Your Woman," "Just My Imagination (Running Away with Me)," "What's Going On," "Never Say Goodbye," "Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)," "I Just Want to Celebrate," "Got to Be There," "Papa Was a Rollin' Stone," "Superstition," "Touch Me in the Morning," "Let's Get It On," "I Wish," "Dancing Machine," "Do It Baby," "It's So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday," "What's Going On," "Love Machine," "Walk Away from Love," "Quiet Storm," "Love Hangover," "I Want You," "Don't Leave Me This Way," "Easy," "Brick House," "You and I," "Three Times a Lady," "Cruisin'," "Still," "Give It to Me Baby," "Super Freak," "Let It Whip," "I Just Called to Say I Love You," "Rhythm of the Night," "Part-Time Lover," "Motownphilly" and "End of the Road," among many others; and the personal story of such legendary artists as Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson and The Jackson 5, Diana Ross and The Supremes, The Temptations, Smokey Robinson and The Miracles, Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, The Four Tops, The Marvelettes, The Isley Brothers, The Commodores, Rick James, Mary Wells, The Velvelettes, Jr. Walker & The All-Stars, Edwin Starr, The Spinners, Gladys Knight & The Pips, Thelma Houston and the seminal Motown house band The Funk Brothers, to name a few.

Motown's cultural and musical significance cannot and should not be underestimated. The ubiquity of the songs — from soft rock stations to commercials to movies to waiting rooms to elevators — has unfortunately somewhat diluted their power. But listen to the voodoo organ and percussion of "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" with fresh ears and their brilliance is devastating. Berry Gordy Jr. founded the first black-owned record label and his stars were the first black artists to achieve crossover success. Only The Beatles and Phil Spector can claim to have so radically changed the American music landscape.

The story of the The Supremes alone is an exceptionally dramatic one. Florence Ballard founded the group in 1959 (initially called The Primettes), only to be replaced as lead singer by Diana Ross when Gordy began grooming the group for mainstream (read: white) appeal. Ballard was eventually removed from The Supremes because of her depressed alcoholism. While Ross and The Supremes went on to superstardom, Ballard died in poverty of a blood clot in her coronary artery at the age of 32.

"Dreamgirls" is certainly bold in attempting to accomplish the story of Motown's founding, The Supremes' tragic trajectory and even adding in an amalgamated male character meant to convey the collective experience of several major black music stars.

Then again, "Dreamgirls" is actually none of this since it's not officially about Motown or The Supremes. Instead, "Dreamgirls" follows the rise of the fictional, Supremes-like girl group The Dreams — consisting of Effie White (Jennifer Hudson), Deena Jones (Beyoncι Knowles) and Lorrell Robinson (Anika Noni Rose) — as the group goes from being the backing vocals for James Brown-ish James "Thunder" Early (Eddie Murphy) to becoming the breakthrough act of Detroit-based, Motown-esque label Rainbow Records, founded by Gordy ringer Curtis Taylor Jr. (Jamie Foxx). As it loosely charts The Supremes story, Deena eventually replaces Effie as lead singer and Effie is soon ousted altogether, leaving Effie to try to make a comeback and perhaps elude Ballard's real-life fate.

Taken on its own terms without being held up as a mirror to The Supremes and Motown, "Dreamgirls" is still a disaster of storytelling, songwriting, musicianship and filmmaking. The story is little more than an gauche assemblage of every show business movie ever made, hitting the plot beats of everything from "42nd Street" to "A Star is Born" to the superior Supremes-based musical "Sparkle" to Mariah Carey's vanity project "Glitter." Edited with limited coherence, the film bounds from scene-to-scene and song-to-song so that things like plot and character become inconsequential. In some ways "Dreamgirls" feels like it was intended to be a four-hour film, only to be cut down in post-production so all that's left are a rushed collection of musical numbers with nary a grace note to lucidly connect them.

Characterization suffers because of this, leaving the actors with nothing to bring to their archetypal ciphers. Any subtext of careerism or the troubling black-on-black and woman-on-woman betrayal at the height of the Civil Rights and feminist movements is nonexistent when Deena supersedes Effie because Deena is no villain; she's merely a woman to whom things happen. Unsurprisingly character interaction is even more feeble. Effie and Curtis are supposedly lovers, but rather than show this, the movie makes the audience guess that it's happening. The audience hasn't been asked to care about this supposed romance, so when Effie belts out the grammatically gawky "And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going" there's no emotional resonance.

Bill Condon has adapted and directed "Dreamgirls" to the screen so inelegantly it would be easy to assume he'd never actually seen a movie musical — except he penned the script for the Academy Award-winning "Chicago," making his clumsiness that much more confounding. His directorial incompetence makes the recent "The Phantom of the Opera," "The Producers" and "Rent" look like the work of Stanley Donen or Vincente Minelli. Condon has no idea how to stage a musical set piece, as proved by his over-reliance on montages whenever someone sings. His script for "Chicago" placed all the musical numbers in a fantasy performance realm and his "Dreamgirls" seems likewise embarrassed to let characters communicate through song unless they're on stage. Even the much ballyhooed "And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going" is ineptly executed from visual interpretation to performance. Condon has Hudson shuffle onto a stage and the characters around her slowly abandon her, exiting stage left, shaking their heads and huffing like high school drama students in a particularly bad production of "A Chorus Line." Meanwhile Hudson, like all "American Idol" contenders, confuses loudness for emotional depth.

Hudson can't be entirely blamed for attempting to find some sort of core to the song through volume alone. The song is merely one of the many clichιs "Dreamgirls" trots out, in this case the exhausted trope of the big black woman stopping the show through a few minutes of diva-ness.

"And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going" is also an example of an overarching problem: the music is uniformly terrible. "Dreamgirls" sets up the possibility this is intentional. Taylor's intent to have his artists crossover to white audiences leads him to "lighten up" (read: "whiten up") the songs the Dreams sings. This objective may explain why the songs are insistently bland, lacking memorable melodies, propulsive beats and intelligible, let alone intelligent, lyrics. But assuming this was deliberate is giving "Dreamgirls" too much credit.

For a musical to feature bad music is problem enough, but it's especially debilitating for "Dreamgirls" because The Dreams is supposedly not just making music; the group is making music history. "Dreamgirls'" inexpressive songs, written by Henry Krieger and Tom Eyen, are especially desolate when held up against the Motown sound. There's more musicianship in the incomparable James Jamerson's opening bassline to "My Girl" than in the entirety of the "Dreamgirls" score. The complete inability to even approximate the lushly orchestrated pop of Motown's songwriting team of Brian Holland, Lamont Dozier, Edward Holland Jr. and the Funk Brothers is the film's greatest failing.

Or at least it would be if "Dreamgirls" didn't also actively undermine the African-American musical experience of the 1960s and 1970s. "Dreamgirls'" doesn't so much appreciate black culture as turn it into a vaudeville show, a Steppin Fecthit act dressed up in Oscar-baiting gowns.

How much "Dreamgirls" truly cares about black music can be seen in the character of Early and the decision to cast Murphy in the role. Early is a combination of James Brown's showmanship, Smokey Robinson's crooning, the stalled career of Edwin Starr and Marvin Gaye's stifled attempts at social awareness, disastrously implying these icons are interchangeable. Murphy dedicated several skits to parodying such musicians as Brown and Stevie Wonder during his 1980-1984 run on "Saturday Night Live." The memory of those lampoons stigmatizes his performance, and Murphy doesn't help matters with his cartoonish turn, which plays like an extended version of his "James Brown's Celebrity Hot Tub Party" sketch.

Like the egregious "Ray" and the OutKast passion project "Idlewild," "Dreamgirls" only serves to trivialize black music rather than celebrate it. If it's true, as Smokey Robinson has said, that the Motown sound isn't a mere collection of chords, bass and drums but something "spiritual," then "Dreamgirls" is the epitome of soullessness.

Posted Sunday, January 7, 2007

Link to this review:
http://filmzeus.pressbin.com/film/dreamgirls