Movie Review: Dreamgirls

By Anne Brodie Dec 23, 2006, 9:47 GMT

Twenty-five years after first bringing Broadway audiences to their feet, the Tony Award-winning musical sensation “Dreamgirls” comes to the big screen starring Academy Award® winner Jamie Foxx (“Ray”), Beyoncé Knowles (“Austin Powers in Goldmember”), Danny Glover (“Lethal Weapon”), newcomer Jennifer Hudson, Tony Award winner Anika Noni Rose (Broadway’s “Caroline or Change”) and Eddie Murphy (“The Nutty Professor,” “Dr. Dolittle”). Set in the turbulent late 1960s and early ‘70s, “Dreamgirls” follows the ...more

A film based on the hit Broadway musical, which opened in 1981, is finally here.

In keeping with contemporary culture, Jennifer Hudson, an American Idol contestant plays the lead role - her voice is a knockout!

She puts the rest of them, including Beyoncé Knowles, to shame. When she sings, you know she is special. You know you’ve been entertained!

Hudson stands up to a cast of veteran actors and singers that also includes Eddie Murphy – he sings James Brown style R&B – Jamie Foxx, Danny Glover and Loretta Devine.

‘Dreamgirls’ is a backstage story, inspired by the Supremes rocky and public story. Professional and personal battles heat things up as a trio of singers tries to break into the big time.

Foxx pays their manager Curtis in a restrained and quiet way, unlike his other performances, and tends to fall off the radar.

Murphy is a fireball of energy, as James ‘Thunder’ Early, bursting off the screen and singing his heart out. His character must deal with changing times and styles and create a new persona for himself, tossing out the one that made him a star. His arc is one of the more interesting ones in ‘Dreamgirls.’

The girls start to catch breaks – they support big acts and finally, become top liners. But their manager makes a business decision that seems misguided. He removes the lead singer (Hudson) in order to push a more conventionally beautiful backup singer to the front. She is unceremoniously replaced by another singer when she protests the lineup switch.

It’s a good story and one that’s familiar to Supremes fans. The film is full of good intentions and it’s exciting that a film version is finally here.

But it disappoints! Making a stage musical a film is tricky – it can‘t be ‘stagey’ which ‘Dreamgirls’ is. The intimacy of the camera is death to a stage show, emphasizing its flaws and dependence on song as opposed to film’s affinity to naturalistic performance.

There is willing suspension of disbelief sometimes when a musical character sings out a normally spoken line, but boy can it be irritating. Staginess enters the picture when the filmmakers have given too little thought to the new medium. ‘Dreamgirls’ seems aimed at Broadway audiences, not at the vast public out there.

Chicago worked because it realized it was no longer a play but a film – entirely different mediums – and behaved accordingly.

I feel like the Christmas Grinch but this film version of ‘Dreamgirls’ did not work for me.

Curtains!

Dreamgirls
35mm musical drama
Directed by Bill Condon
Runtime: 131 minutes

Opens limited release,  December 25 2006. MPAA: Rated PG-13 for language, some sexuality and drug content