Motown Melodrama

There are a million problems with Dreamgirls, the new movie musical. It chronicles the rising fortunes of a Motown-like record label and the singers who get involved with it, but none of the songs that make the label’s fortune would even have made it to the flip side of a Motown 45. The one character who is always right about the music America wants to hear is the movie’s villain, while his supposedly more principled underlings stand around whining about wanting to perform music that nobody rightly wants to hear.

Dreamgirls strains for social significance to a laughable degree, with two black lovers fighting on a Detroit street while the city burns around them following the assassination of Martin Luther King. Most problematic is its Rube Goldberg structure: Its high point comes about an hour into the movie, and as a result you feel a little hung over through its final half.

And yet, and yet, and yet. The truth is that one can’t ask for much more from a moviegoing experience. Dream girls is a propulsively en tertaining melo drama in the great tradition of the backstage musical–one of those stories about the inner workings of show business that is, in reality, about as accurate a depiction of the entertainment world as The Flintstones is of the Stone Age.

The backstage musical is a genre as old as talking motion pictures. (The first talkie, The Jazz Singer, was a backstage musical of sorts.) Dreamgirls is an exceptionally juicy example. It offers thrilling re-creations of showbiz venues of yore–a Detroit theater in the early 1960s, a swanky Miami Beach nightclub complete with Don Rickles comic, a Vegas showroom at the height of the Ring-a-Ding-Ding days, an intimate rooftop jazz club gone to seed–with costumes and wigs and makeup to match each moment in pop-culture time.

The plot mirrors the rise of Diana Ross and the Supremes, as a trio of teenage girls forms a singing group called the Dreams. An ambitious hustler named Curtis Taylor Jr. (Jamie Foxx) arranges for them to become the backup singers to James Thunder Early (Eddie Murphy), an R&B star whose celebrity remains confined to the “race records” market. Curtis takes Effie (Jennifer Hudson), the Dreams’ full-figured loudmouth lead singer, to his bed as he pines for her gorgeous backup, Deena (pop star Beyoncé Knowles). The third Dream, Lorrell, becomes Jimmy Early’s mistress.

Impresario Curtis has a plan to get out of the musical ghetto and appeal to white audiences by smoothing out Jimmy Early’s rough sound and sexualized stage antics and turning him into Johnny Mathis. Eddie Murphy has given remarkable performances in the past–he gave six or seven alone, as I recall, as an entire family in The Nutty Professor, and two in Bowfinger as a paranoid movie star and his nerdy brother–but he seems to have been given a new lease on life playing the glorious and ever-hungry Jimmy, who is incapable of suppressing his carnal exuberance unless he uses narcotics to do so. It’s a vital and vivid piece of acting, as powerful in its moments of despair as when Jimmy is hurling himself about the stage.

Curtis gives up on Jimmy and decides to turn the Dreams into his crossover act. The problem is that his lover, Effie, is a female version of Jimmy, with her mammoth gospel voice. So he turns Deena–the prettiest and thinnest and most anodyne of the Dreams–into the lead singer and relegates Effie to backup. She is furious, and she rebels by showing up late for rehearsals and generally being difficult.

Dreamgirls has a difficulty in common with all backstage musicals, which is that the rise to glory is always much more exciting and vivid than what happens after the protagonists achieve triumphant success. Many backstage musicals solve the problem by having the movie end at the moment of triumph. 42nd Street literally concludes with the thunderous applause of the Broadway audience on opening night as the curtain comes down on the show we’ve watched develop over the previous 90 minutes.

But Dreamgirls is both more glorious and more problematic than most. Its moment of triumph is also a moment of devastation–both for the characters, the plot, and the movie itself.

That moment comes right in the middle, as a heartbroken Effie is fired from the act and dismissed from her lover’s bed in a number called “It’s All Over”–a double humiliation to which she responds with a song called “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going.”

It is no exaggeration to say that the eight minutes containing these two numbers comprise one of the most overpowering sequences in the history of American film. Writer-director Bill Condon, who adapted the 1981 Broadway musical, keeps his camera moving around the movie’s seven central characters (minus Early) as they engage and argue with the infuriated Effie. They circle her like buzzards as they attack and counterattack. She then turns on her boyfriend and informs him that “there’s no way I can ever go . . . I’m not waking up tomorrow morning and finding that there’s nobody there.”

But Curtis has already dumped her twice, and as she hollers out words of romantic perseverance, she knows and we know that what she’s actually experiencing is a moment of pure existential abandonment. (The song, by composer Henry Krieger and the late lyricist Tom Eyen, is so extraordinary it only serves as a reminder of how unmemorable the rest of the score is.) The sequence comes closer than anything I’ve ever seen on screen at duplicating the raw power of opera.

A young singer named Jennifer Holliday, who has never done anything else of note, became a Broadway legend 25 years ago with her original performance of “And I Am Telling You” (which is available, complete with spine chills, on YouTube). The same thing is about to happen for Jennifer Hudson, who plays Effie in the movie. This is an ineffable cinematic moment, a scene people will remember 70 years from now the way people still talk about Judy Garland sitting on that haystack singing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”

Of course, there’s still a whole lot to get through–what happens to Effie and the Dreams and Curtis and Jimmy. And we do get through it, and what we see is just fine with many moments that are better than just fine. Ultimately, Dreamgirls can’t compete with itself. But then, what could?

John Podhoretz is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.