Stop! In the name of love

The Supremes embodied soul music with a light touch in the face of heartache. "Dreamgirls" stomps on the band's legend.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Read more: Stephanie Zacharek, Movies, Movie Reviews, Arts & Entertainment, Reviews, Dreamgirls

Photo: DreamWorks, Paramount

Beyoncé Knowles, Anika Noni Rose and Jennifer Hudson in "Dreamgirls."

Dec. 15, 2006 | "The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll" includes a wonderful photograph of the original Supremes -- Mary Wilson, Diana Ross and founder Florence Ballard -- circa 1965, posing in front of a supermarket display of their very own brand of bread, Supremes Bread. As the biggest and most marketable Motown act of the time, the Supremes could have lent their names to just about anything, and we can only imagine that impresario Berry Gordy -- the man who made the Supremes larger than life -- sold them out for loaves of white bread, in puffy white wrappers bearing their likeness, simply because the price was right.

White bread may be an enduring symbol of blandness and of whiteness, but this photograph -- showing us three women smiling dutifully for the camera, dressed in luxe, boxy coats and wearing shellacked wigs that could withstand any windstorm -- is, to me, more touching than it is ironic. Today, pop stars lend their faces and bodies to expensive watches and designer clothes, but the Supremes, who found fame in very different times, lent their glamour to something anyone could buy. Their sound, whipped full of air and wonder, lofty and light even in the face of hardship and heartache, was magic as commodity: It was the staff of life, packaged.

"Dreamgirls," originally brought to the Broadway stage by Michael Bennett in the early 1980s and now a movie musical directed by Bill Condon, is another kind of package, one that commodifies the Supremes' story by turning it into something shrink-wrapped, airless and glitzy. "Dreamgirls" -- which opens today for one week at the Ziegfeld Theater in New York, and nationwide on Dec. 25 -- is a fictional version of the Supremes' rise to fame and the ensuing rifts and rivalries between its members: A Detroit singing trio -- they start out as the Dreamettes, later dropping the "ettes" -- become huge stars with the guidance of a sharp but duplicitous manager, Curtis Taylor Jr. (Jamie Foxx). The group's frontwoman, Effie White (2004 "American Idol" finalist Jennifer Hudson), is a pretty powerhouse with a big voice and a lush, zaftig figure to match; she's also Curtis' girl. As Curtis grooms the trio to succeed not just in Apollo Theater-type venues but in swanky supper clubs as well (in other words, he's training them to jump color and class barriers), he pushes Effie, with her very big, very black voice, into the background, and makes her willowy, glamorous co-member, Deena Jones (Beyoncé Knowles), the trio's star; third member Lorrell Robinson (Anika Noni Rose) is simply eager for success and goes along with the power play. Deena's voice has the "lighter" -- in other words, whiter -- touch Curtis is looking for; the subtext is that Effie is too intimidating for white audiences, too coarse for the aura of elegance Curtis wants to cultivate for the group.

All of those things essentially happened to the Supremes, too: Even though Florence Ballard had the strongest voice of the three women, Berry Gordy ultimately pushed the vixenish Diana Ross into the lead singer's slot. The snub deeply troubled Ballard, and she was fired from the group in 1967; she died in poverty in 1976, after several failed attempts to launch a solo career.

It's the kind of story that's almost too big to be contained by fiction, and "Dreamgirls" -- beginning with Tom Eyen's book, which was adapted by Condon for the screen -- doesn't come close to mapping the alternately sad and joyous contours of that story. This is a puny, pinched vision of R&B history and of R&B itself, a sanitized, show-tunized reading of some of the greatest pop music to come out of the 1960s. An early scene in "Dreamgirls" features a speech about how the white man has repeatedly stolen from the black man, and yet the show's music sounds like one massive instance of thoughtless appropriation. The songs -- with lyrics by Eyen and music by Henry Krieger -- sound nothing like those that came out of Motown (with their repetitive but dreamily seductive Holland-Dozier-Holland hooks); they have the toe-tapping sheen of the phoniest show music, as if you could give a melody soul just by wriggling your spirit-fingers extra-hard. Even the movie's alleged showstopper, the bloated ballad "And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going" (made famous by Jennifer Holliday, who originated the role of Effie onstage) is less a song than a diaphragm workout, a number designed to prove how physically demanding it is to pull off. When Hudson's Effie performs it here, you can see her trying to find some emotional footing on this craggy Matterhorn. It's a testament to Hudson's gifts as a singer, and to her unsugary effervescence, that she actually comes close to making the song mean something. (And even then, the sequence is cut so clumsily we're barely allowed to watch her; editor Virginia Katz -- who has done terrific work elsewhere, particularly on "Jet Li's Fearless" -- has chopped the number into little bits, distracting us from Hudson's unshakable focus.)

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