It is said that a great actor or actress can “bring down the house,” but before I saw (and heard) the 25-year-old American Idol finalist Jennifer Hudson in the film version of the 1981 Broadway musical Dreamgirls, I can’t recall the last time I truly feared for the architectural stability of a movie theater. When Hudson, who is making her film debut, sings the end-of-first-act showstopper “And I Am Telling You I Am Not Going,” it’s as if some spiritual force had taken hold of her entire being: Her body trembles with each passing note, her wide brown eyes seem to speak the lyrics before they arrive at her lips, and the voice that erupts out of her hardly sounds human—it’s the kind of thunderous, soul-stirring bellow that a wronged goddess might make upon learning that she had been betrayed for a mere mortal. And so she has.
At that moment in the film, Hudson, who plays one member of a 1960s all-girl R&B trio called the Dreams, is confronting her manager/ex-lover (Jamie Foxx) over his decision to oust her from the group in favor of a less-gifted, less-temperamental, and less-full-figured replacement. But really, she’s singing about her need to be loved—not just by anyone, but by the very man who has callously betrayed her. And so acute is her agony that mere words aren’t enough to express it. Like all of the most joyous and tragic moments in movie musicals, it can only be sung.
With a star turn like that at its center, a movie doesn’t need too much more, but Dreamgirls has plenty to go around. Its sense of showmanship is overflowing, from the opening talent-contest revue, in which Detroit teenagers Deena (Beyoncé Knowles), Lorrell (Anika Noni Rose), and Effie (Hudson) are picked to sing backup for the glitter-outfitted James “Thunder” Early (Eddie Murphy), through to their farewell concert as the Dreams a decade later. The director, Bill Condon, who also adapted Dreamgirls for the screen, has the temperament of a vaudeville entertainer—he wants to give you your money’s worth and then some.
Arriving in a renaissance period for the big-budget Hollywood musical, Dreamgirls is by far the best of a crop that includes the Oscar-winning Chicago, which Condon himself penned. Among that picture’s many failings, it seemed vaguely embarrassed to even be a musical in the first place, relegating its production numbers to fantasy sequences set inside its characters’ heads and otherwise making sure to give the audience fair warning: “OK. Don’t be frightened. We’re going to sing now.” Dreamgirls, despite being similarly set in a theatrical milieu, feels no such compunction. Its characters don’t just sing directly to one another, in the real world, but when they do, what they’re singing about actually moves the story forward.
So it pains me to say that, on some crucial level, Dreamgirls falls short of expectations. Largely, the source material is at fault: Written by Tom Eyen (with music by Henry Krieger) and staged by the legendary director-choreographer Michael Bennett, the Broadway version of Dreamgirls drew much attention for its thinly veiled fictionalization of Berry Gordy Jr.’s Motown Records and the behind-the-scenes drama of Gordy’s girl-group phenom, the Supremes. Even today, it’s easy to see Foxx’s cool, calculating impresario, Curtis Taylor Jr., as a transparent Gordy surrogate, Knowles’ Deena as the comely Diana Ross, and Hudson’s Effie as the doomed Florence Ballard (the original Supremes lead singer who fell into depression and alcoholism).
But by now, so much of Dreamgirls‘ real estate has been overdeveloped by the rash of Broadway and big-screen music biographies (Ray, Walk the Line, Jersey Boys) that it’s tough to get too worked up over yet more scenes of naive young vocalists hearing their song on the radio for the first time, encountering the ugly face of racism, and discovering that fame isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. And as both play and film, Dreamgirls takes a kid-gloves approach to its most intriguing subject: the way that black music moguls like Gordy systematically watered down grinding soul rhythms with vanilla pop melodies in the name of “crossing over” black artists to the pop charts.
But the right combination of elements can make you forget that a movie falls short of the greatness to which it aspires, and Dreamgirls has them. The movie is very cannily cast: Murphy as a onetime legend whose best moves have been lifted by younger performers; Knowles as the reluctant diva searching for some meaning amidst the stardust; and Hudson, who as surely as anyone knows what it means to get voted off the island. And Dreamgirls proves more absorbing in its second half, when Effie comes to dominate the story and when the movie itself becomes less about the path to stardom and more about what happens after you’ve made it (or haven’t).
That’s also when Condon, who occasionally seems overwhelmed by the sheer bigness of the production, stops trying to wow us with one high-energy production number after another and recaptures in a few key scenes (including “And I Am Telling You . . . ” and the tender “When I First Saw You,” sung by Foxx to Knowles) the exquisite intimacy of his two nonmusical biopics, Kinsey and Gods and Monsters. In moments like those, Condon grasps what has eluded most of his contemporaries: Anyone can give us the old razzle-dazzle, but what makes a movie musical soar is nothing more or less than the quiet exhilaration of two individuals on the screen, enraptured by song.
