Mr. Simon, yours is one of several reviews I have read which essentially criticize “Dreamgirls” for what is seen as improper depictions of Motown figures or music. However, “Dremagirls” is a work of fiction, and it is not in any way a biographical film. It makes sense that Curtis and Deena are not quite like the real-life Berry Gordy and Diana Ross, because the story is a fictional one inspired by, but not intended to actually depict, their lives. Gordy never married Ross, Florence Ballard (the real life counterpart to the fictional Effie White) never quite made it on her own, and so on. Criticizing “Dreamgirls” in this way is like criticizing Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” for improperly depicting the Ed Gein murders.
Similarly, the score is a Broadway one with a wider range of R&B/soul influences than only the Motown Sound. Even if “Dreamgirls” were trying to perfectly reflect Motown’s music, the “Motown Sound” should only be present in a small fraction of the songs performed, given the timeline of the film’s plot. The “Motown Sound” era began in 1963 and ended in about 1971, “Dreamgirls” takes place from 1962 to 1966, and 1973 to 1975). A soundtrack full of songs that sound like “Baby Love” and “My Girl” might be nice for fans wh oenjoy that surface-layer of Motown’s catalogues, but it wouldn’t be accurate to the music that came out of the record label during the entirety of the 1960s and 1970s. Although tempered through the stylings of Broadway, “Dreamgirls” gets it closer to right than a lot of people seem to realize. The thing it gets most right is the fact that the story criticizes Motown as much as it pays tribute to it: the film takes the position of most R&B historians in criticizing the label for cutting its R&B to make it palatable to white audiences. Notice, once The Dreams crossover, how the company ignores the Civil Rights Movement happening around them, particularly the 12th Street riots in Detroit.
As someone who knows the history behind Motown “frontways and backways”, I should be the first person offended by the film. Instead, I was thoroughly impressed by just how much Bill Condon studied the history of Motown and the other prominent R&B labels and artists of the era.
