Motown sliced too thin

Rating: 7/10 (25 December 2006)

Dreamgirls is a filmed musical that by reports stays close to its Broadway source. It provides glitzy entertainment, with a tale of intrigue and manipulation and glamorous song performances featuring increasingly chic hairstyles and slimmer singers, as the central black girl song group based on the Supremes loses its more soulful, plumper member, Effie (American Idol's Jennifer Hudson) along with its bad wigs and moves on to superstardom. Behind them is a promoter who himself achieves mega-bucks status and adopts hipper hairstyles, but not without bending a lot of rules and using a lot of people.
It may seem unsporting to say so, but this movie, despite its glitter and entertainment value, leaves an empty feeling. There are major questions about how American musical history gets treated here, for the sake of some fairly unexciting original musical numbers. One basic question is, if Effie was the singer who could move you, how did the group become a hit without her, regardless of the promotion? It's obvious Dremagirls refers to Berry Gordy Jr.'s Motown in its focus on impresario Curtis Taylor Jr. (Jamie Foxx). First this Gordy-surrogate hires a soul singer, James "Thunder" Early, persuading a young black girl group, The Dreamettes, to sing backup for him and pushing out the Dreamettes' sedate manager Marty Madison (Danny Glover). Next Taylor promotes the Dreamettes separately and eliminates Effie. He sells out his used car business to buy payola air time for the group's songs.
Gordy pushed Florence Ballard out of The Supremes and made the slimmer more homogenized looking Diana Ross the lead singer. But there's an important element missing from the movie: the charisma and magic of Diana Ross. Her stand-in here, Deena Jones (Beyoncé Knowles) just can't come close, so the success of the Dreams (as they're re-christened) without Effie remains a mystery.
Berry Gordy was involved in payola and he manipulated his groups. But this story is unfair to Gordy, Motown, and black music. It refers to male singers through a composite of James Brown, Little Richard, et al., represented by Jimmy Early (Eddie Muphy), whose performances are uninvolving mimicry and who dies early (get it) of a drug overdose. Motown's greatest star Michael Jackson gets shrunken to ten seconds of a group mimicking the Jackson Five, not even getting the dancing right and seen only on TV. The many other sensational Motown stars beloved of black and white audiences are forgotten, as is the Disco era, since Diana Ross stand-in Knowles is seen as the only Disco diva in Taylor's stable.
Subplots like Effie's affair with Taylor and child by him whom he recognizes later, Early's affair with Dreams member Lorell (Anika Nori Rose), and Deena's attempt to star in a movie as Cleopatra, do nothing to make up for how the plot slights black musical history.
Jamie Foxx is uneasy and ill cast as the cruel manipulator, Curtis Taylor. This character gets muddled because as the screenplay makes him more and more evil, Foxx seems to be trying harder and harder to make us like him. Maybe he's trying to show Taylor as more three-dimensional, but the character as written is too cardboard thin for that to work.
Sure, Motown groups were packaged, and we don't know how many soul singer' souls were destroyed in the process. But Dreamgirls fails to show how huge Motown was for American culture in general and African American culture in particular in the Sixties, Seventies, and Eighties. Gordy's was a big accomplishment, not a narrow con game. What of the "Motown sound"? There's only one sound here, and it doesn't sound right. The movie makes us long for little clubs with down-dressed performers like Effie as we see her eventually making a partial comeback helped by the faithful Marty Madison. Knowles has one big number, but Hudson soars every time she opens her mouth, even if she can't act. While the big numbers are emotionally empty, the group's composer, Clarance "C.C." Brown (Keith Robinson) is moving in his song, "We'll always be family." Robinson gives his small role some feeling and intensity.
It's hard not to see this as really the story of Effieshe's the only singer we really care about. The audience is electrified by Hudson's farewell song, "And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going" (though it goes on too long and is poorly directed) and can't wait for her to come back on screen. The elaborate production numbers staged with The Dreams are just flash. But the movie doesn't show that Motown performances, with Diana Ross at the center, could be both glitzy and musically exciting, and these forgettable showtunes don't begin to remind us how often songs out of Motown could stay engraved on our hearts and minds forever.