Dreamgirls (***1/4)

 ? The Broadway musical based loosely on the story of the Supremes comes to the screen. Beyoncé Knowles takes on the Diana Ross role, the pretty girl singled out by a record company mogul (Jamie Foxx) to lead the “Dreams,” while the ostensible group leader (Jennifer Hudson), the plump Effie, gets pushed to the background despite her powerhouse voice. The overarching theme of the story is the desire for authenticity, which is contrasted with the pressure for commercial success. Foxx’s Curtis Taylor Jr., modeled after Motown founder Berry Gordy, represents the latter.

+ Like Chicago, this made me forget I didn’t like musicals. Hudson is already famous for this, her debut role, and her character is the one who goes through the most changes and whose vocals must carry the greatest emotional weight. Besides Hudson’s Effie, the most compelling character is Eddie Murphy’s, playing a singer whose career is revitalized when he signs with Taylor’s label. Murphy shows none of the mannerisms of his comedy roles and with his singing atones for his big bad hit single “Party All the Time.” The music includes both “period” songs incorporated into the story, the best of which I found to be the ersatz Motown ones from the first half of the film, and the burst-into-song numbers that sound like a soulful take on traditional Broadway show tunes. That all of the music (not the lyrics) was written by Henry Krieger is impressive given this stylistic range.

- Chicago screenwriter Bill Condon has the directing chores here too, and he’s certainly competent, but the film lacks the visual panache that Rob Marshall gave to that musical. Moreover, whereas Chicago was essentially finely polished fluff, Dreamgirls is a movie that’s meant to seem realistic despite being a musical. Given that, I thought that a couple of the characters, especially Effie, seemed to have personality shifts that seemed jarring. The performances and the music definitely fill in some of these gaps, but they’re still there, mostly in the 1960s scenes. And the music snob in me compels the minor complaint that most of the “early 1960s” songs sounded a few years ahead of their time. An admittedly funny scene goes the opposite way: a white group does a bland cover version to prevent the more soulful original from charting. Although this was done often in the 1950s, the practice had declined, and the performance in the movie would have already seemed dated by the time the scene takes place. I’m being picky, but a movie like Ray did just a little better job of portraying the music business.

= ***1/4 The movie contains some dramatic lapses that would be more noticeable in a non-musical, but the performances (musical and dramatic) are on the whole tremendously entertaining, even touching. At over two hours, the movie still goes by quick.

IMDb link