Time to Get Going

Dreamgirls Directed by Bill Condon

“And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going”—realistically understood as “The Stalker’s Anthem”—is the show-stopping number from Dreamgirls in which a woman begs and threatens a man to love her. Despite its ostentatious build-up, “And I Am Telling You” has not entered the Broadway canon: It’s a number white actresses don’t/won’t attempt because it’s culturally stigmatized. The song is so wildly humiliating that it can only be rationalized as a cartoonish black stereotype—the anguish of Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday and Aretha Franklin thoughtlessly jumbled and coarsened into a hebephrenic climax.

All this is worth pointing out in order to understand that the hype surrounding the gaudy movie version of Dreamgirls is unacceptable. The film’s makers mindlessly reproduce the stage show’s inauthenticity. The media have conceded to this nonsense, as if it were all in good fun. But this “fun” is dubious, typecasting black American behavior and culture into shrillness and frivolity. The essential silliness of Dreamgirls was brilliantly captured in the little-seen indie Camp when a white teenage girl sang the showstopper to a pipsqueak black boy. It flipped the show’s own stereotypes and exposed the song’s inane sentimentality while demonstrating that it only functions as a theatrical device: Aunt Jemima Ex Machina.

Sure, Dreamgirls is basically a confection, but its core is soul-rotting. It trivializes black American pop music’s mid-20th century development into a world-conquering force, reducing the amazing, irresistible Girl Group phenomenon into pop of a lower order—camp. A dreadful betrayal takes place in the show’s oft-reprised title song: “We’re your dreamgirls/Boys, we’ll make you happy/Dreams that will never leave you.” That’s not just an adolescent paean—at heart, it’s gay fandom. But the very real subject of androgynous identification (black girls in white drag) gets obscured; it deserves better than this trashy roman à clef.

Critics generally accept that Dreamgirls recreates the story of Detroit’s black-owned Motown Records and how entrepreneur Berry Gordy chose Diana Ross to be the leader of The Supremes, prompting the demotion of the late Florence Ballard. But this fable is historically inaccurate, the plot an inane excuse for melodramatic hysteria. What Dreamgirls gets wrong—everything from the music to history to the misunderstood cultural iconography—is more damaging than any entertainment it offers. Dreamgirls threatens to leave audiences ignorant of how showbiz operates, how black artists and hustlers compromise, how American pop culture thrives.

In place of the awesome reality of Motown’s ’60s cultural revolution, Dreamgirls-the-movie becomes a plasticized emblem of today’s soulless Celebrity. Director/screenwriter Bill Condon follows the synthetic example of Chicago, replacing that film’s showbiz cynicism with an ethnically degrading naiveté. The members of the Girl Group known as The Dreams (Beyoncé Knowles, Jennifer Hudson, Anika Noni Rose), wear bubble wigs to match their bubbleheads. They’re not playing icons but ghetto-to-glamour clichés. Condon’s fast-pace style doesn’t hide the insipidness because his cast is left playing stereotypes, not characters. Jamie Foxx’s hard-hearted hustler Curtis Taylor Jr. shows no affection for the girls or for deal making; he never grasps that Gordy’s passion for success expressed a bold, new African-American will.

Condon zips past the styles of the era without feeling (characters step out of a recording studio into—uh, oh—a race riot). This stupid compression also negates Eddie Murphy’s characterization of James Thunder Early, the soul-man star who features The Dreams as his backup singers. It was a conceptual catastrophe to cast Murphy, a hilarious mimic, in a role that is nothing more than an impersonator’s amalgam. James Thunder Early, with his turd-like pompadour, ruinously resembles Murphy’s “SNL” parodies of James Brown and Little Richard; mocking their triumphs and shrinking their genius to drug-addict tragedy. Yet, the spectacle of Murphy’s own career-comeback has taken the place of real drama. The same substitute realism affects Beyoncé’s performance as Deena; her colorless, unmotivated ambition turns into the spectacle of watching Beyoncé be Beyoncé: not the disarming, sexpot prodigy but the Celebrity—which Condon offensively equates to Diana Ross’s fame.

These two villains reveal Dreamgirls’ fakery. Condon disrespects the complex struggles of black pop artists. By tilting the aura of “genuineness” to Jennifer Hudson’s caterwauling Effie, the overweight belter who loses her man and her group to the superficial Deena, Dreamgirls insults the true legacy of black pop. Taylor’s Rainbow Records is an insipid version of Motown, and the treatment of race history is as glancing as in The Five Heartbeats.

All this was more faithfully rendered in the 1976 film Sparkle (now available on DVD). Dreamgirls ripped-off the Girl Group story of Sparkle, a genuine cult classic—forgotten by white Americans but fondly remembered by black moviegoers who responded to Curtis Mayfield’s suite of songs (ranging from teen pop to female torch) and screenwriter Joel Schumacher’s affection for the gospel-based strivings of R&B. Director Sam O’Steen’s dark imagery of Harlem stage shows had tactile sensuality, and Lonette McKee, in the central role as the doomed lead vocalist of Sister and the Sisters, paid homage to those great talents who never made it beyond the Apollo. McKee’s ripe voice and luminous narcissism were scorching. Hollywood’s failure to embrace McKee after that stunning debut puts all this folderol about Jennifer Hudson in perspective.

Hudson sings in the non-threatening, impersonal style of most “American Idol” contestants. Her version of Dreamgirls’ aria is loud, not moving. She isn’t actress enough to make the song’s loony emotions believable. Besides, it isn’t as durable as other Broadway arias; it worked only through Jennifer Holliday’s unbridled melisma and psychodrama. Holliday’s interpretation became a (black radio) classic; the inauthentic show itself never did. You don’t have to dull your taste with Dreamgirls; there’s always Sparkle.