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Your support makes all the difference.Dreamgirls is the kind of film musical which explains why it was that film musicals went out of fashion. A thinly-veiled history of Diana Ross, The Supremes, and Motown Records, it charts their rise and fall from the mid-Sixties to the mid-Seventies. Instead of The Supremes, it revolves around the Dreamettes, an all-girl trio which gets its break by providing backing vocals for a James Brown / Little Richard type, James "Thunder" Early (Eddie Murphy). And instead of Berry Gordy, there's Curtis Taylor Jr (Jamie Foxx), a hard-nosed entrepreneur who renames the girls the Dreams, and promotes one of the harmony vocalists to centre stage. From now on, the big-lunged but big-boned Effie (Jennifer Hudson) will be in the background, and the weak-voiced but telegenic Diana Ross - sorry, Deena Jones (Beyoncé Knowles) - will be in the limelight.
It's the tale of someone being elbowed aside in favour of their prettier, blander counterpart, which is a bit rich coming from a film which, in essence, does the same thing, stealing the Motown story, and then selling a prettier, blander version. And yet Dreamgirls never catches the Motown sound. The film is based on a musical, written by Tom Eyen and Kenry Krieger, which was a Broadway success in the early 1980s. Unfortunately, it evokes 1980s Broadway a lot more than 1960s Detroit. Instead of Motown's perfect pop, we get horribly self-important, pizzazzy torch songs which could have come from the Fame TV series. The music gets especially hard to take in the film's second half, which is a downward spiral of tear-stained power ballads destined to be bawled at drunken karaoke nights by women celebrating their divorces.
As well as sounding like an anachronistic Broadway show, Dreamgirls looks like one, too. It's a brightly lit, plastic-coated approximation of an era, which would be acceptable in a theatre or a nostalgia-themed burger restaurant, and acceptable in a film which is set in a heightened fantasy world, à la Moulin Rouge. But it's not acceptable in a film which wants to document Black American history: when the Detroit riots are flattened to a stylised backdrop, something's not quite right. Bill Condon, the writer-director, did a much cleverer job as the screenwriter of Chicago. He got over the why-are-all-these-people-crooning problem by having the song and dance numbers take place in the heroine's showbiz-addled imagination, whereas Dreamgirls doesn't have any such internal logic. Initially, the characters sing only when they're on stage. But then, after 50 minutes, they suddenly burst into light opera in the middle of an argument, hollering lines such as, "You're self-absorbed and unprofessional" at each other.
It's a pity that someone didn't just throw out Eyen and Krieger's musical and make a proper Motown docudrama. That way, we'd have catchier songs, edgier stories and more dynamic personalities: in Dreamgirls, every character is as shiny, thin and cardboard as an album cover. When the Oscar nominations were announced, there was some muttering about whether Murphy and Hudson were too pivotal to be in the Best Supporting Actor and Actress Categories. But in fact everyone in the film is a Supporting Actor or Actress, because no character has enough individuality or screen-time to count as a lead role. Beyoncé looks fantastic in 847 different outfits, but she doesn't do any more acting than she does in her videos. Murphy jolts the film into life whenever he's onscreen - which isn't often - but it's the same performance as he gave in The Nutty Professor. As for Hudson, she's the one with the Cinderella story of being scorned by Simon Cowell on American Idol, but maybe Cowell had a point. All she proves in Dreamgirls is that she can belt out a tune loud enough to wake up the deepest sleeper. Otherwise, Dreamgirls would have its audience nodding off.
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