Two separate lives

Dreamgirls
Directed by Bill Condon ***

The quest for fame, fortune and the adulation of millions, along with the conflicts such pursuit engenders, has been a staple part of American culture and popular mythology for decades. Think of
A Star Is Born (either version), or Ike and Tina Turner in What’s Love Got to Do With It. Think now of Dreamgirls.

This is a thinly disguised look at the rise and fall of Diana Ross and the Supremes, who rose from poverty stricken Detroit to superstardom. It stars Jennifer Hudson as Effie, the would-be Supreme, Dreamgirl, the one with the greatest vocal talent who was rejected mainly because she was overweight. Hudson had her own taste of rejection when caustic, sexist Simon Cowell tossed her off American Idol. This film could be called “Hudson’s Revenge”.

Beyonce Knowles plays Deena Jones, the Diana Ross figure. She’s beautiful, she can sing, but her acting and vocal talent are not in Hudson’s league. Besides those of the girls, the film features some top-notch performances by Jamie Fox as the Berry Gordie-like Curtis Taylor Jr. and Eddie Murphy as the James Brown-like Jimmy Early.

Dreamgirls began life as a hit Broadway musical. Although Condon does try to open the film up a bit the result still feels more stagy than natural. The references to current events such as the Detroit Race Riots and the speeches of Martin Luther King seem tacked on rather than organic. The most potent political message comes when it is shown that even through the mid-sixties, black musicians could not get a lot of their music played on white radio and television stations. The anaemic cover of a black hit by a lily-white singing group is so bad it is risible.
The dance sequences are high energy and charming. And Hudson? She deserves a long successful musical career, but not an Academy Award.

The Good Shepherd
Directed by Robert DeNiro ***

The Dreamgirls story is as American as cherry pie. So is The Good Shepherd, but it shows a very different slice of American life.
It’s a story of the creation of the CIA, from its beginning as a secret intelligence- gathering agency active during World War II to its official start in 1945. Matt Damon plays Ed-ward Wilson, a career bu-reaucrat in the spook business. Damon’s flat performance fully reflects the over-controlled cipher that is his character.

Wilson’s personality makes him perfect for the job but the viewer is never given insight into what makes him that way. He first appears on screen as a supposedly sensitive Yale poetry student. His life changes after he is recruited into the elite Skull and Bones society.
This is a fraternity of straight, upper-class, white boys, those deemed worthy by the gatekeepers of joining and upholding America’s governing plutocracy. Both President Bush and his father are members. Among other operations, the film covers the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion and the recruitment of Nazi scientists by the US government after WWII, but offers little insight into these affairs.

The film shifts back and forth in time in an attempt to make things more compelling but rarely rises above the blankness of its main character. Angelina Jolie is capable in the small role of Wilson’s long-suffering wife. His long work absences and his se-cretive nature make her feel she is living with a ghost. She is.

The film can be riveting at times because of its chilling revelations about the rulers of America. At other times it’s as exciting as watching Wilson working at his favourite hobby – assembling ships in a bottle.