Story Highlights
• "Dreamgirls" has energy, some excellent performances• Movie falls victim to cliches of musicals and showbiz
• Jennifer Hudson and Eddie Murphy are standouts
By Tom Charity
Special to CNN
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(CNN) -- A quarter-century after it opened on Broadway, "Dreamgirls" takes off like it means to make up for lost time.
Even as the opening titles roll the dazzling first number is up and running. In no time at all the Dreamettes, Deena, Lorrell and Effie (Beyoncé Knowles, Anika Noni Rose and Jennifer Hudson), have lost another talent show but won a new manager, Curtis Taylor (Jamie Foxx), and a big gig, singing backing vocals for R&B star James "Thunder" Early (Eddie Murphy). They're on their way.
Writer-director Bill Condon -- adapting Tom Eyen and Henry Krieger's 1981 Broadway musical, loosely based on the story of the Supremes -- keeps up a breathless pace throughout the girls' heady rise. Even when they hit a bump -- white radio stations won't play black records -- the dilemma is swiftly resolved within the spin of the next 45.
This is the 1960s, and there is a whiff of revolution in the air -- or at least, a glimpse of rioting at a dramatically appropriate moment. Romance too: Lorrell pairs with Jimmy (who's married); Effie hooks up with Curtis. Together, they're on the verge of breaking out of the chitlin circuit and into the mainstream.
Then the movie changes its way -- and, perhaps, loses it.
Plot-wise, Curtis puts pretty girl Deena on lead vocals because she looks better on TV. Effie -- who has a big voice, and the body to match -- walks out. Mood-wise, optimism and uplift gives way to cynicism and bitterness, and musically, R&B and soul morphs into disco and blah Broadway ballads and belters.
Suddenly everyone's singing dialogue at each other like they're Judy Garland doing the weather report.
Condon is a savvy operator -- he wrote the screenplay for "Chicago" and made "Gods and Monsters" and the underrated "Kinsey" -- but trying to smuggle a full-blown old-time musical through the stage door like this won't wash with everyone. At the downtown public preview screening I attended the front row immediately started sniggering.
It gives one pause: Maybe the movie musical in its traditional form is past revival. "Chicago" got by, but audiences haven't been willing to make the same imaginative leap for film versions of "Rent," "The Producers" or "Phantom of the Opera."
"Dreamgirls" is a much better movie, no doubt about it, dynamically edited and bristling with energy. Hudson sings her heart out, and whenever she and Eddie Murphy are on screen the movie lights up. Both are good bets for Oscar recognition.
However, Beyonce is all too persuasively bland and Foxx is disappointing in a role that could have used more shading. To be fair to them, Condon never allows the very brief dramatic scenes to build. Everything is a cue for the next showstopper -- two dozen of them.
Along the way, the film has salient observations to make on how crossover success comes at the cost of artistic integrity (or in Jimmy Early's case, raunch). But as a slice of potted pop history it feels, well, potted -- not least because it wants those Oscars more than it cares about Diana Ross, Berry Gordy, the homogenization of pop or the fate of the civil rights movement.
In reality, the Supremes' first singer, Florence Ballard, died in poverty in her early 30s. In "Dreamgirls," Effie White is allowed a triumphant comeback -- sweet vindication for Hudson, of course, but also for the hoariest showbiz clichés.
"Dreamgirls" runs 130 minutes and is rated PG-13. For Entertainment Weekly's take, click here.
