‘Dreamgirls’ is enjoyable, but no showstopper

Frankly, there’s nothing here that can touch “Stop! In the Name of Love” or “Respect.” It might have helped to drop some numbers and substitute one or two of the standards associated with Etta James or Diana Ross — just as the 1968 movie of “Funny Girl” removed the stage show’s tentative finale and substituted a more rousing and better-known torch song for its climax. The Krieger/Eyen songs sometimes suggest B-sides to Motown classics.

Still, most of them function just fine as show tunes that push the narrative along. The title tune has an infectious quality, “Family” is essential to the story, “When I First Saw You” has some romantic force, and Hudson works hard to put across her most demanding number: “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going.”

Unfortunately, this cry of defiance is staged, shot and edited in a nervous MTV style that undercuts Hudson’s work and makes Effie seem operatic and overwrought. A longer, less cluttered take of the same performance might have been more effective.  

An Oscar winner for writing “Gods and Monsters,” Condon doesn’t always make the best choices as a director. He creates one particularly awkward transition too late in the movie, when he asks us to accept the performers suddenly leaving the concert stage and singing as the characters they’re playing. The film versions of “Cabaret” and “Chicago” (which Condon wrote) faced similar stage-to-offstage problems but got around them through a directorial sleight-of-hand that doesn’t seem available here.

Condon is better at suggesting the passage of years, wittily recalling the heyday of “The Ed Sullivan Show” and Dick Clark’s “American Bandstand,” when whitebread rockers like Pat Boone covered rhythm and blues. The director draws a particularly sharp contrast between the Dreamettes’ early days, when they were forced to follow their manager’s orders, and their later blossoming as star attractions.

When the impulsive, business-oriented Curtis pushes the reluctant Deena into playing Cleopatra in an epic movie, Condon can’t resist underlining the absurdity of the situation. Yet it’s almost credible as a career turning point.

Anticipation can hurt a movie like “Dreamgirls.” For those who have grown up with the songs and the show and wonder why it took so long to complete a movie version, there’s bound to be disappointment that the transition isn’t perfect. But Condon does so many things right, beginning with the casting and including the staging of the concert numbers, that there’s still much here to embrace.

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