*1/2 (out of ****)
Starring Jamie Foxx, Beyonce Knowles, Jennifer Hudson, Eddie Murphy, and Danny Glover
Directed & written for the screen by Bill Condon
2006
131 min PG13
Two movies, really, with the jumbled all-over-the-place narrative to prove it. One movie is engaging in a shallow, pop way, about a charming-yet-tyrannical music manager who sells out and commercializes R&B music in the 1950s and ‘60s. Because the manager is played by Jamie Foxx, he instantly brings to mind Ray Charles, another of the era’s musicians who was a shrewd businessman. Foxx also brings to mind his turn as “Miami Vice’s” Ricardo Tubbs, with his machine gun delivery of facts, figures, and accounts – at any moment, as he coaxes singers onto his label, you expect him to cap his seduction with “Smooth – that’s how we do it.” He essentially “whitens” black music but his motives remain ambiguous throughout. Is he simply hungry for money and power, or is he driven by the spirit of compromise and unity? It’s telling that he puts out a record of a speech by Martin Luther King, the bourgeois Christian conciliator, and not one by the subversive Muslim, Malcolm X.
But the bulk of “Dreamgirls” is, alas, a movie made by idiots for idiots. Characters express what they feel in words, then a moment later in song, then in words again. Then fifteen minutes later they’ll make the same point AGAIN, in words, song, and words. Yet, stunningly, the audience members who enjoyed “Dreamgirls” the most, who clapped after the songs, stomped their feet, and talked throughout – this was THE worst crowd I have ever seen a movie with, so this review can hardly be called definitive – actually ASKED EACH OTHER WHAT WAS GOING ON. As dumb as “Dreamgirls” is, it still isn’t dumb enough.
Unconvinced that even a light-hearted take on race relations and the music business would sell tickets, “Dreamgirls” itself “sells out” by wasting our time with a bitchy and vapid cat-fight between the members of one of Foxx’s musical acts. The cat-fight is so utterly uninteresting and trite that my wife and I couldn’t even remember the names of everyone involved. As one of the divas, Beyonce barely registers during the first half of the film and lacks the charisma and presence she had in “Austin Powers.” As the other diva, newcomer Jennifer Hudson of “American Idol” fame runs the gamut from adequate to wooden and often moves like she’s on the verge of having a seizure.
The failure of screenwriter-director Bill Condon (who was also behind the similarly execrable “Kinsey”) is to make an actual movie out of this Broadway musical. The distance between performer and audience in a stage musical means we can tolerate ham-handed messages and cornball humor, but leaving it in a movie is obvious and embarrassing. What’s more, the cat-fight between the divas is only interesting as a subplot, as an extension of Foxx’s ambiguous moral downfall; Condon’s decision to give the divas so much screen time strikes me as a mistake. The cat-fight begins because Foxx changes up which diva sings lead, from the big-voiced and big-bodied Hudson to the blander, skinnier Beyonce. (In one the movie’s few instances of subtlety outside of Foxx’s face, Beyonce’s skin lightens as the film progresses.)
Condon fares better with a subplot involving another singer on Foxx’s label (Eddie Murphy, in a fine performance). Foxx keeps trying to make Murphy more acceptable to mainstream audiences by making him into a more conventional crooner, but Murphy thwarts him again and again with horny stage screeches while bumping ‘n grinding.
The music is all technically proficient, but it’s not my style. Completely unmemorable, it combines all that’s bad about Broadway musicals with the yelling and screaming rewarded by “American Idol.” To me, this combination is (in the words of Dale Gribble) “the feces created when shame devours failure.” The lyrics “horribly Satanic” pop up early on (as opposed to “just a little bit Satanic?). Yes, it’s impressive to hear Jennifer Hudson scream at the top of her lungs for four minutes solid and make sure that not a drop of emotion remains in her plight, but after we’ve heard her do it once, why does she (and later Beyonce) have to do it two or three more times?
As I write this review a day later, I appreciate Foxx more and more. There’s a moment in which Beyonce says “you don’t know anything about movies” and he gets a look on his face like he’s about to yell “I’m Jamie Freaking Foxx!” before hitting her across the face with his Oscar. By the end of the film, however, he is practically reduced to a Bond villain (which, now that I write that, doesn’t sound like a bad idea…). And “Dreamgirls” just goes on and on, well past two hours, with more screeching, more clichés, more “you go-girl!” resolutions. So, yeah, Foxx is good and this should have been his movie, and there were shots of Beyonce in period costume that made me think atheists are retarded, but, as the for the rest of it … blech.
Finished Sunday, January 7th, 2007
Copyright © 2007 Friday & Saturday Night
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