Finally caught up with Dreamgirls last Friday night, and spent the whole car ride home arguing with my wife over whether the movie is a lively paean to the transcendent power of leave-it-all-on-the-stage performances–my wife's take–or an overbearing, under-thought, fundamentally dishonest pop pastiche.
The thing is, I really wanted to like Dreamgirls. None of my A.V. Club colleagues were impressed with it, and I can count on one hand the number of critics I respect who've had anything nice to say; but I tend to have a different reaction to movies with a strong musical component, so I had hopes that this one would connect too. But even from a musical perspective, Dreamgirls is kind of a bust. I knew going in that Dreamgirls' songs aren't so much catchy Motown knock-offs as attenuated musical theater showpieces, but I wasn't prepared for their overall blandness, or the way the lyrics hit every emotion square on the nose, leaving little room for interpretation. The songs borrow a few superficial poses from classic R&B;, but they've been cleaned up and softened, and given a weakly academic gloss. (More on that in a moment.)
From a visual standpoint, director Bill Condon gives the movie some snap. The images are sharp and memorable, and the editing rhythmic. But he lets the performances rage out of control. Jennifer Hudson's big moment, "And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going," starts strong, but by the end she's stamping her feet and scrunching up her eyes like a toddler throwing the tantrum, and since that feeling is all there in the song already, acting it is overkill. The same goes for Beyonce's big song in the last act. They're both expressions of the kind of "entitlement" that Dreamgirls claims to disdain. We're meant to be slain by them, and if we're not, we're the ones at fault.
Mainly though, Condon's problem is that he's working with bum material, and he plays it too straight. Every now and then the movie seems just about to verge into camp–like the sequence where Beyonce's Donna Summer impression buries Hudson's Roberta Flack–and if Condon had really run with that mood, Dreamgirls would've been much more fun, and even incisive. (It also wouldn't stand a chance of winning any Oscars … more on that in a moment, too.) As it is, Dreamgirls purports to tell a veiled version of the rise of Motown and Diana Ross, with an accent on juicy gossip and the secret of what it really takes to succeed in America–yet it can't deliver on its promise, because everything has been simplified beyond even what the musical form requires, with over-determined heroes and villains.
That mix of the historical and the conventionally dramatic makes Dreamgirls unstable. The story's supposed to be about the perils of selling out principles for commercial success, and yet the musical sells itself at every turn, effectively saying, "Isn't it's awful what's happened to soul music?" and then serving up another watered-down song that we're supposed to love. There's no complexity, depth or sophistication either to its message or its presentation–no sense that compromise might serve a higher purpose, or that enduring greatness can be born of misdeeds.
Which is what's so aggravating about Dreamgirls' virtual pre-approval as a Best Picture Oscar-nominee. Before it had even screened for a single pundit, Dreamgirls arrived in awards season as a prohibitive favorite, and like a college football team that begins the season ranked in the Top 5 and stays in the Top 10 even after they lose–just because they started so high–Dreamgirls has weathered bad reviews and tepid early-awards-season response to stay, if not on top of the Oscar lists, at least firmly on the "in."
And why? The Academy is known for having faux-sophisticated taste–that's why my money's on Little Miss Sunshine to win Best Picture with its dopey insider's take on outsiderdom–but are the voters really leaving Dreamgirls screenings feeling smarter than when they went in? Have they been uplifted and touched? Or will they just be casting another blind vote for the cinematic equivalent of Notre Dame?
We'll know more Tuesday, when the nominations come out.
P.S. In the interest of domestic harmony, I should note that my wife is a woman of great class and taste whose reasons for loving Dreamgirls I totally respect. (She explains herself here.) And she'd want me to add that I really didn't hate the movie as much as it may seem. Some of it I actually liked, and I found it watchable throughout. But ultimately, there's just not much there, beyond a lot of glistening sweat.