Jennifer Hudson and Eddie Murphy: Reasons to See This Mediocre Costume-Fest

Rating: 5/10 (12 January 2007)

"Dreamgirls" has more puffy, shiny, macramed, and sequined 1960s costumes than a Barbie doll, but costume changes do not a movie make.
"Dreamgirls"' construction is muddled. Scenes seem thrown together after being mixed up in a Cuisinart. Direction is clumsy. Jennifer Hudson's big number, "And I'm Telling You I'm Not Going," is undercut by poor placement of her on the screen.
The script is only so-so, and Jamie Foxx, in a key role, is very badly cast. He's supposed to be a mover and shaker, a natural born leader. He just never comes across that way. In a key scene, he tells a vulnerable performer that that performer's voice is no good. That scene should cut right through the viewer. Instead, I sat there consciously thinking, "I'm supposed to be moved by this, and nothing is happening." The music? Look -- "The Big Chill" is a better musical depicting the power of the Motown sound than "Dreamgirls." You can't hear a Motown song without wanting to sing along, and maybe getting up and dance along. The music here is so-so at best, a terrible slight to Motown, which deserved so much better.
You might want to see the movie, anyway. One reason: Jennifer Hudson. She's amazing. That she's never been in a movie before, and yet she is the most charismatic figure on screen, speaks volumes about Hollywood's inability to see and nurture talent in a woman who weighs more than 98 pounds.
Hudson is beautiful. I don't care how much she weighs; Hudson outshines the much thinner Beyonce Knowles.
Beyonce Knowles is beautiful, too, of course, and looks, convincingly, like Diana Ross. Like Ross, Knowles' non-distinctive face proves a perfect canvas for men's fantasies.
But Hudson's voice is grand. I hope we'll see her again -- but given how the world treats plump women, I'm afraid we won't. So, see her here while you can.
And ... Eddie Murphy. Murphy plays a non-comedic role, and his is the best male performance in the movie. In one scene, Murphy's character receives very bad news. He decides to do something self-destructive. Someone else tries to intervene. Murphy gives the other actor a look of such resignation and despair that I wished for ten more non-comedic performances out of Murphy, ASAP.
As for the big message of the movie - that African American women had to slim down, look almost white, and sing "white" in order to be successful, I have a question. What about Tina Turner, Ella Fitzgerald, and Aretha Franklin? What about women like Bonnie Raitt and Joss Stone who strive to create a sound that has been associated with black women? Too, the movie makes passing reference to Elvis Presley and John F. Kennedy. These references are highly ironic, and yet the movie never seems to realize why. To gain the presidency, Kennedy had to publicly deny that his Catholicism would ever affect his politics. He had to lose some of his ethnicity in order to be successful. Elvis Presley was a hillbilly who became a lacquered, drugged up action figure in Las Vegas. He, too, had to change for success.
If the movie had developed that theme more -- that all of us, of all ethnicities, are invited to sell out to fit in and make it -- the movie could have been more interesting.