February 10, 2007
dreamgirls
It's been well-remarked that the songs for Dreamgirls are inaccurate pastiches of Motown that insistently sound like (and are choreographed like, and shot like) nothing so much as Broadway showtunes of no particular provenance. Somewhat less noted is that the songs are just plain bad. But even this is not the movie's Achilles heel.
To care about the story, the tragedy of the wronged, proud and ruined Effie, one must believe that she is a better singer than Deana — and in turn believe that, as performed, Jennifer Hudson is a better singer than Beyonce. This is on par with believing that Joe Cocker is a better singer than Mick Jagger. Wow, that Joe Cocker, he can really belt it out.
Which is sort of the point. Jennifer Hudson, she can really belt it out. She's a perfectly capable singer of a particular kind: a pastiche of the Aretha-style Baptist-soul shouter. As it happens, Beyonce (even as she dulls down her edge for the first half of the film) is an exceptional singer of a particular different kind. To buy the movie's entire emotional premise, one must accept that the former kind of singing (no matter how much we patter about being so over it) is more authentic than the latter, that Effie is a real chanteuse while Deana is promoted to center stage because she has more white appeal and more sexy. Triumph of appearance over essence. Debased age of the image. And on and on.
Every single thing about the movie reiterates this message, except our ears — most obviously in the song "One Night Only" where we are offered the slow soulful version by Effie, followed rapidly by the vapid disco version (because we all know that disco is vapid, right?) by Deana et al. We are supposed to ignore the extent to which the latter is much better; to hear the set of cultural presumptions, and not the songs. But that's merely the moment in which the film most overplays its cards; once you notice that Deana, — despite her inability to belt it out — is a more interesting, mobile, nuanced singer than Effie, the entire film becomes nonsensical.
It's not just that its aesthetic blindness gets contemporary music all wrong. By now we know that, even if Mick Jagger wanted to be a bluesman at 19, he found himself as a great singer when he departed that mode — after he found thirty other ways to sing songs, the least of which reveals Joe Cocker's technical chops and capacity to push a lot of air as bare schtick, giving of the narrowest and most bathos-laden emotional valence imaginable. And by now we know, one prays, that that Aretha style is but one among many; that it's no more real or authentic than the styles of Martha Reeves or Dusty Springfield or Donna Summer or Michael Jackson or Beyonce or The Brazilian Girls. That Aretha happens to be transcendently magnificent within that style is a fact about her, not about the style. Beyonce, as it happens, is the Aretha of her style. Jennifer Hudson is a better actress than singer.
Even less honorably, the movie's confusion gets Motown utterly wrong. Berry Gordy, Jr. was almost assuredly not a good guy, and the formation of Motown surely had the usual quiver of terrible motivations. Nonetheless, to paraphrase the great music critic Ludwig Wittgenstein, Commercial melodic soul seemed like a discovery, but what its discoverer really found was a new way of singing, a new comparison: it might even be called a new sensation. The idea that Florence Ballard, no mean talent, was in Diana Ross's league as a singer of songs is comical; Ross was perhaps as compelling within the new sensations of Motown as Aretha was on good ol' Columbia. The idea that Motown sold out art for commerce, talent for gold, is truly tone-deaf; the attachment to this movie's story is an indicator of a staggeringly conservative account of art, and an index of that account's tenacious hold.
7) Smokin' Aces (nothing)
6) Dreamgirls (the club sets; Eddie Murphy's Marvin Gaye skullcap)
5) Notes on a Scandal (Bill Nighy dancing)
4) Alpha Dog (Justin Timberlake in general)
3) Backstage (Isild LeBesco's facial physiognomy; plausibility of such drecky pop being huge in France)
2) Children of Men (blood on the lens for long tracking shot; Clive Owen's slumped shoulders)
1) Pan's Labyrinth (Spanish Winona Ryder; Harold & the Purple Crayon riff; title better in English)