Dream Come True

Although the primary purpose of Cannes is to screen films in their completed form, the festival also serves as a showcase for movies in various stages of production, as well as a launching pad for films that are, for the time being, no more than ideas in their makers' heads (or perchance full-page ads in the pages of Variety.) This year, two major studios (which recently became the same major studio) have come to the festival with 20-minute previews of two high-profile, big-budget releases scheduled to arrive in theaters in the coming months. One is Paramount's World Trade Center, directed by Oliver Stone and starring Nicolas Cage as a New York Port Authority officer who becomes trapped beneath the rubble of the Twin Towers. The other is DreamWorks' Dreamgirls, based on the Tony-winning Broadway show of the same name and the latest in Hollywood's ongoing attempt to breathe new life into the musical genre.

Generally speaking, I'm not much interested in seeing bits and pieces of movies that I'll eventually have to see in their entirety — even less so when, as in the case of the Dreamgirls preview, the footage being screened isn't one uninterrupted section of the film but rather a highlight reel of scenes spanning the length of the film. Still, my curiosity in the Dreamgirls project has been such that, Friday evening, I bit the bullet and attended the preview event — and I'm happy to report that the experience ranks among the highlights of my Cannes experience thus far.

Set during the 1960s and '70s, Dreamgirls tells the story of a Supremes-like trio of black female singers (played in the film by Beyoncé Knowles, former American Idol contender Jennifer Hudson and Tony-winner Anika Noni Rose) from their discovery in a talent competition to their employment as the backup singers for the Jackie Wilson-like soul singer James "Thunder" Early (Eddie Murphy) and their eventual breakout as headliners under the guidance of a svengali-like manager (Jamie Foxx). On Broadway, the show ran for more than 1,500 performances, but as the recent film versions of Rent and Phantom of the Opera ably demonstrated, stage success is no guarantor of cinematic success, either artistically or financially speaking.

Of course, those movies were also saddled with poor source material and directors who didn't seem to have ever seen a musical, let alone know how to direct one. Dreamgirls, conversely, is the work of Bill Condon, who did a superb job at the helm of Gods and Monsters and Kinsey, and who wrote the film version of Chicago — the only recent movie musical to set the box-office ablaze, and one about which it is safe to say that the screenplay was a good deal better than the direction. At the time, Condon was praised for devising a structure by which all of Chicago's musical numbers became fantasy sequences unfolding inside the characters' minds — a salvo to the conventional wisdom that modern moviegoers are unwilling or unable to suspend their disbelief at the sight of screen characters spontaneously bursting into song and dance. But judging from the four complete musical numbers from Dreamgirls presented in Cannes, this time out Condon has said to hell with conventional wisdom and let the characters strike up a tune whenever they feel like it. In other words, he's made a musical that isn't afraid to be a musical.

That's not all: from the first of the sequences — the jivey and exhilarating "Fake Your Way to the Top" — in which a backstage meeting between Early and the Dreams gives way to an energetic montage charting the group's rising popularity, it was clear that this Dreamgirls is a richly cinematic affair, full of extravagantly expressive crane and dolly shots and in-camera set changes. And from the looks of things, this could be Eddie Murphy's best role in years. To say much more would be premature, but let me put it this way: if the other two hours of Dreamgirls are as good as this, the film's December 21 release is something worth looking forward to.