Dreamgirls
Once word got around about Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho," audiences in 1960 headed into the theater knowing something exciting was in the offing. They knew that Marion Crane would check into the Bates Motel and that her shower would be interrupted. Yet when that hand with the knife began slashing, they shrieked anyway. The scene was that good.
"Dreamgirls" contains the shower sequence of musical theater. It's called "And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going," and in Bill Condon's clumsy screen adaptation of the 1981 Tony award winner, Jennifer Hudson slowly enters the bathroom, peels back the curtain, and carves mercilessly into the song until the memory of Jennifer Holliday's mythical stage version collapses to the floor of the tub.
Hudson plays Effie, the lead singer of the Dreams, a rising 1960s girl group from Detroit, based on the Supremes. At the movie's halfway point, she's been demoted so that Deena (Beyonce Knowles), the prettiest, lightest-skinned member of the trio -- and the one with the less powerful voice -- can get them richer and more famous faster.
Effie's climactic number is an angry cry from the heart, and her manager, Curtis (Jamie Foxx), is the man in the cross hairs. He orchestrated her demotion. Deena takes Effie's spot on stage, and in his bed.
Yet the song is as much about lust for fame as it is for a man: "And you! And you! And you! You're gonna love me." The three acts in Hudson's rendition -- tragedy, torture, triumph -- do just that, moving the audience to cheer.
While the sequence isn't imaginatively shot, edited, costumed, or staged (one descending light fixture looks like a spaceship coming to take Hudson away), for five exhausting minutes "Dreamgirls" is something to see. We almost don't need to believe in the bogus relationship between Effie and Curtis. The pain of its demise is right there in Hudson's sweaty face, mussed hair, and out stretched arms. Hunched, wrecked, she's a hot-flashing Ethel Waters.
Hudson was a finalist three seasons ago on "American Idol," and watching her here, I thought about Barbra Streisand's screen debut in "Funny Girl." Hudson isn't given nearly enough room to make the impression Streisand did, yet the movie reminds us of something that Hollywood hasn't done much since: show us that talent is beauty. But when there's no music, "Dreamgirls" is dead, and, sadly, that goes for Hudson, too.
The cast includes Anika Noni Rose, a recent Tony winner in "Caroline, or Change," who portrays Lorrell, the third Dream; Danny Glover, as another manager, edged out by Foxx; Keith Robinson as Effie's brother and the group's chief songwriter; and Sharon Leal as Effie's more petite, less defiant replacement. These are talented people, but Condon seems content to let them stand around in the frame like pickets. Even Foxx seems out of it, and he's the most effortlessly sexy man in the movies right now.
Knowles isn't an embarrassment. She even happens to be a more imaginative singer than Hudson. If she can't out-belt her costar, she slyly out-interprets her in their argumentative duets. But mostly she's a sweet nonentity. Her performance as a criminally aggrieved girlfriend in her recent "Ring the Alarm" video was more convincing.
The second half of the movie follows Deena's rise to megastardom during the gaudy Studio 54 era. In a parade of hair and costume changes, Condon uses Knowles as a mannequin, as if he's paying tribute to Diana Ross in "Mahogany." Of course, casting the pop star in "Dreamgirls" 2006 is insidiously clever. Adults of a certain age will remember that the show purports to be about Ross and the Supremes. Their young daughters and nieces should be excused for thinking the movie is about Beyonce and Destiny's Child.
Only Eddie Murphy, playing a James Brown-like showboat, gives a completely sustained performance, and it's coming mostly from his hips. Never mind that he's just doing a bulked-up version of his old Brown impersonation from "Saturday Night Live." It's funny, it's electric, and it has real soul.
Even when the camera is on Murphy, the filmmaking short-circuits. Condon and his editor hurtle through scenes at a sloppy, breakneck pace. Like nearly every other movie musical made in the music-video age, the longest shot lasts about seven seconds, and nearly all of the musical numbers are done either as badly staged live performances or are chopped up and sprinkled like parsley over breathless plot-advancing montages. During a few numbers, everything moves so fast we can't tell who's singing the songs.
It's taken "Dreamgirls" 25 years and several false starts to get to the screen, so it's a shame to see what a rush job it feels like. Now that it's here, everyone seems desperate for the movie to work -- the critics, the Oscar swamis, the black and gay audiences who've waited all this time. It's no fun saying that it doesn't. But Condon, who's one of the smartest men in Hollywood, has no feel for musicals. His dramas, "Gods and Monsters" and "Kinsey," keenly explored the limits of societal norms, especially where homosexuality is concerned. But Condon's screenplay for the Oscar-winning "Chicago" afforded him this directing opportunity, and the result is a similar visual mess that the world seems hell-bent on loving.
The director's attempts to ground "Dreamgirls" in the major moments of the late 1960s and 1970s -- Nixon! Black power! 'Nam! -- are embarrassing. As the camera passes over a blighted Detroit, or Effie's dashikis, you realize that the movie is out of step with the times. The would-be Motown songs (they're just show tunes with little Afros) are all wrong. The film needs the sharp ghetto pain of Curtis Mayfield, not more cardboard ballads. Any director hoping to capture racism, catfights, and urban decay with music this square, and filmmaking this haphazard, is a fool. Ain't no mountain low enough.
Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com. For more on movies, go to boston.com/ae/movies/blog.
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