Deborah Lipp

Dreamgirls (2006) 9/10
When a trio of female soul singers climb the pop charts in the early 1960s, their style, sound, and lives change in unexpected ways.

Dreamgirls is pretty much everything you’ve heard. The music is fantastic, the performances are mind-boggling, and with all the razzle-dazzle, all the makeupcostumesstagingsingingspectacle, you still manage to experience an unexpected amount of nuance and thoughtfulness.

The opening thirty minutes or so will renew your faith in the movies. Everything is perfect. The editing and photography are so deft, so down-to-the-beat, that you’re left breathless. And while you’re kind of falling apart at the glory that is Jennifer Hudson‘s voice, and while you’re asking yourself if that mousy little girl can really be Beyoncé, and while Eddie Murphy‘s James Brown-style soul singer is just blowing your mind, the film is also smartly moving the plot forward, doing some real character development, and also setting time and place with style.

So does it all fall apart? Hell no. It does get to drag, and then it gets a second wind, a new chapter is getting going. And somewhere in that second chapter I realized, “Oh, shit, they’re telling the whole story of the Supremes.” It’s kind of too much. Then there’s a huge, wall-size poster of Deena Jones’s (Beyoncé) face that is designed to leave no doubt that this is Diana Ross circa 1976. I think the roman à clef aspect of the thing is overplayed, too many poses and costumes that are perfect imitations. It’s not a biopic after all. Since so much of the ending of Florence Ballard‘s life is fictionalized, what’s the point of acting like it’s all true?

And now that I’ve bitched, let me say I think that’s a minor point, and I think the movie is a must-see if you have any tolerance for musicals at all.

Here’s what I love about Dreamgirls, and what has stayed with me: In the midst of all the music and dance and soap opera, we are getting a genuine history lesson. Not the gossiping behind the hands about Berry Gordy, but the real story of the racism that permeated the music industry, and how it shaped soul music and “cross-over” music.

There’s an early scene of Eddie Murphy and the Dreamgirls singing Cadillac Car, and then later the song being “covered” (stolen) by the whitest white-bread Perry Como teen idol type, and in what is essentially a musical joke these scenes manage to encapsulate the entire story of what was happening to African-American music at the time. I can’t think of many movies that have done something like that so skillfully.