A Great Blockbuster Musical ... Except for the Music (Oops!)

Rating: 4/10 (26 December 2006)

Let's start with what's good. First and foremost, the performances are terrific, especially those by Jennifer Hudson and Eddie Murphy, both of whom deserve their likely Oscar noms for supporting roles. The first half of the story is way too predictable to be anything more than decent, but there are some nice turns (not quite twists) in the third act and it ends up quite satisfying as drama. And finally, of course, it looks great.
So what's wrong? Three things, all having to do with the music. (Note: I've been a music critic for thirty-five years, far longer than I've been a film buff.)
First, filmed musicals have essentially two choices. On one hand, they can show us a world where people sometimes break spontaneously into song and are accompanied by unseen musicians, and do so without explanation or apology. Or they can go post-modern on us and give us a rationale for this preposterous phenomenon, as was done so brilliantly in CHICAGO and BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER's "Once More With Feeling." The riskiest thing you can do is hedge your bet midway. Which is exactly what DREAMGIRLS does. Because it's a musical about musicians, half the musical numbers are simply songs being performed by the characters. Others are old-fashioned now-I'm-going-to-sing-instead-of-talk numbers, and some are hybrids, songs performed by the characters with snippets of I'm-singing-not-talking inserted via montage. Now, director / screenwriter Bill Condon wrote CHICAGO, so I'm sure that this inconsistent approach was intentional and was an attempt to expand the vocabulary of filmed musicals. Some may find that it works. It didn't for me; I was frequently taken out of the story by it.
Second, any movie about the making of music has the chance to delight us by faithfully capturing the music-making process, by letting us watch as music is created, learned, refined, perfected. We got some of that in RAY and WALK THE LINE (and any movie based, however loosely, on the story of the Supremes and Motown Records invites that comparison) and a ton of it in HUSTLE AND FLOW. Here? Nothing, nada, zilch. There's not one moment where you say, oh, wow, that's how musicians do it, that's where music comes from. In that regard, it might as well have been a movie about three young black woman insurance underwriters.
Finally -- and I've saved the biggest for last -- the music itself is thuddingly mediocre, standard Broadway pap with a thick R&B veneer. And the arrangements and production are simply awful, bearing no relationship at all to the actual pop Motown style. The Supremes' songs had swing, they had subtlety, the vocals weren't overwhelmed at every turn by blaring horn fanfares. The overproduction here is relentless, reaching its zenith during Hudson's final number, where we continue to hear the soulless fifty-piece orchestra obliterate the nuances out of the song even as we're watching Hudson perform it in a nightclub backed by a small combo!
I know a lot of people will love this movie despite the huge musical shortcomings. For them, I pose this question: how insanely great would this movie had been if all the songs were as great as "Where Did Our Love Go," "Come See About Me," "Back in My Arms Again," "You Can't Hurry Love," etc. etc., etc.? The gulf between the music we're hearing and the actual music of the era portrayed is immense and staggering.