A Dream Come True

But here's the thing: The audiences did cheer at both screenings I attended, and while my breath was never absent, it wouldn't surprise me if some people's were, especially during breakout star Jennifer Hudson's show-stopping mid-film performance of "And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going." To trot out another hoary cliché, they don't make movies like this anymore, or at least they don't make movies like this well anymore, and that's the great thing about Dreamgirls: It's a broad, emotional, outsize Hollywood spectacle that works on virtually every level.

First of all, it's a musical, which is a genre rarely mounted these days and almost never mounted successfully; last year's traditional musicals Rent and The Producers were abysmal disasters, and 2002's Oscar-winning Chicago was more a museum piece than a movie. But Dreamgirls, adapted from the hit 1981 Broadway musical, feels alive both musically and cinematically in a way that those films never did. Writer-director Bill Condon, who wrote the screenplay for Chicago, deftly brings the rags-to-riches story of a 1960s girl group (loosely based on The Supremes) to the screen with exactly the right balance of showmanship and earnestness, casting actors who can genuinely sing (Jamie Foxx, Eddie Murphy) and singers who can at least approximate acting (Beyoncé Knowles) and opening up his visual style to break the story away from the stage while retaining its inherent theatricality. In short, he does everything right.

It helps that he's working from first-rate material—the songs by Henry Krieger and Tom Eyen successfully recreate the R&B, soul and disco sounds of Motown (on which the film's Rainbow Records, owned by Foxx's Curtis Taylor Jr., is based) from the early '60s through the mid-'70s, and the characters are vividly drawn, if a little familiar. Knowles plays the Diana Ross-like Deena Jones, a bland singer with a relatively unremarkable voice whom Taylor elevates to lead singer of trio The Dreams over the more powerful but volatile (and hefty, in more ways than one) Effie White (Hudson). As Deena and The Dreams rise to superstardom, Effie struggles in her onetime friend's shadow and Taylor becomes increasingly ruthless as his record label takes off.

It's not hard to predict the major beats of the plot, but that doesn't matter in a movie like this, which could tell its story entirely through costumes and hairstyles if it wanted to. The music serves the story well, underlining and amplifying the most important emotional moments, even if it can at times sound a little too showtuney. Condon composes his cast as well as he composes his images, using Knowles' awkwardness and Murphy's hamminess as building blocks of their characters, and allowing Hudson to give a wonderful, unrestrained performance that embodies diva qualities both in song and speech (and imperious tilt of the head). She carries the film, and trust me, when she sings her soul out on the film's most heart-rending numbers, audiences will cheer.