At that moment in the film, Hudson, who plays one member of a 1960s all-girl R&B trio called the Dreams, is confronting her manager/ ex-lover (Jamie Foxx) over his decision to oust her from the group in favor of a less gifted, less temperamental and less full-figured replacement. But really, shes singing about her need to be loved not just by anyone, but by the very man who has callously betrayed her. And so acute is her agony that mere words arent enough to express it. Like all of the most joyous and tragic moments in movie musicals, it can only be sung.
With a star turn like that at its center, a movie doesnt need too much more, but Dreamgirls has plenty to go around. From the opening talent-contest revue in which Detroit teenagers Deena (Beyonc Knowles), Lorrell (Anika Noni Rose) and Effie (Hudson) are picked to sing backup for the glitter-outfitted James Thunder Early (Eddie Murphy) to their farewell concert as the Dreams a decade later, the sense of showmanship is overflowing. Director Bill Condon has the temperament of a vaudeville entertainer: He wants to give you your moneys worth and then some.
Arriving in a renaissance period for the big-budget Hollywood musical, Dreamgirls is by far the best of a crop that includes the Oscar-winning Chicago, which Condon himself penned. Among that pictures many failings was that it seemed vaguely embarrassed to even be a musical in the first place, relegating its production numbers to fantasy sequences. Dreamgirls, despite being similarly set in a theatrical milieu, feels no such compunction. Its characters dont just sing directly to one another in the real world, they actually move the story forward.
So it pains me to say that, on some crucial level, Dreamgirls falls short of expectations. Largely, the source material is at fault: Written by Tom Eyen (with music by Henry Krieger) and staged by the legendary director-choreographer Michael Bennett, the Broadway version of Dreamgirls drew much attention for its thinly veiled fictionalization of Berry Gordy Jr.s Motown Records and the behind-the-scenes drama of girl-group phenom the Supremes. Even today, its easy to see Foxxs cool, calculating impresario Curtis Taylor Jr. as a transparent Gordy surrogate, Knowless Deena as the comely Diana Ross and Hudsons Effie as the doomed Florence Ballard (the original Supremes lead singer who fell into depression and alcoholism). But by now, so much of Dreamgirls real estate has been overdeveloped by the rash of Broadway and big-screen music biographies (Ray, Walk the Line, Jersey Boys) that its tough to get too worked up over yet more scenes of naive young vocalists hearing their song on the radio for the first time, encountering the ugly face of racism and discovering that fame isnt all its cracked up to be. And as both play and film, Dreamgirls takes a kid-gloves approach to its most intriguing subject: the way that black music moguls like Gordy systematically watered down grinding soul rhythms with vanilla pop melodies in the name of crossing over black artists to the pop charts.
But the right combination of elements can make you forget that a movie falls short of greatness, and Dreamgirls has them. The movie is very cannily cast: Murphy as a onetime legend whose best moves have been lifted by younger performers; Knowles as the reluctant diva searching for some meaning amid the stardust; and Hudson, who as surely as anyone knows what it means to get voted off the island.
And Dreamgirls proves more absorbing in its second half, when Effie comes to dominate the story and the movie focuses on what happens after youve made it (or havent). Thats also when Condon stops trying to wow us with one high-energy production number after another and recaptures in a few key scenes (including And I Am Telling You... and the tender When I First Saw You, sung by Foxx to Knowles) the exquisite intimacy of his two non-musical biopics, Kinsey and Gods and Monsters.
In moments like these, Condon grasps what has eluded most of his contemporaries: Anyone can give us the old razzle-dazzle, but what makes a movie musical soar is nothing more or less than the quiet exhilaration of two individuals on the screen, enraptured by song.
