How do you solve a problem like Mamma Mia!?By any objective standard, this film version of the ABBA-licious musical is terrible. The direction is graceless, the vocal performances are karaoke-level at best, the choreography is pedestrian, and the jokes—i-yi-yi, the jokes!—are the lamest, most shopworn, cornball stage shtick imaginable, aimed straight at the tourist-trade rubes from the Midwest who made this show such a smash on Broadway. And damned if the Friday-night audience I saw the film with didn’t lap it all up: Stellan Skarsgård walking away from the camera to reveal his bare bum, Meryl Streep falling through the ceiling onto an air mattress, her legs sticking up in the air, Christine Baranski making jokes about her fake boobs... whether the characters were falling into the water with their clothes on or being caught with their clothes off, all of it was greeted with gales, literally gales of laughter from the fifty- and sixtysomething couples who’d filled the theatre (while all the cool people were on the other side of the multiplex taking in The Dark Knight). Can a movie truly be called bad if it gives its audience this much pleasure?
Maybe I’ll have a better answer for that question next week, after I’ve finished picking my jaw up off the floor and “Chiquitita” has finally stopped echoing around in my brain. In the meantime, here’s my best stab at a reply.
Mamma Mia! may be terrible, but I’ve never seen a movie embrace its own terribleness as completely as this one does. I even think it might be terrible by design: every performance—the acting as well as the singing and dancing—is literally on the level that you’d find in any office talent show. Where most musicals try and wow you with the actors’ superhuman vocal talent and the astonishing athleticism and precision of the choreography—you know, with skill—Mamma Mia! goes the opposite route and gives you a musical where literally anybody in the audience could sing and dance just as well as anybody onscreen. (Pierce Brosnan cannot sing to save his life—and he gets two songs!) They could probably have replaced the director and choreographer too with no appreciable difference in the final product.
Everyone in the film hams it up in the most amateurish way—idiotically pantomiming the lyrics of the songs, striking self-consciously goofy “diva” poses as they sing into hairbrushes and reach for the high notes, dressing up in silly ’70s jumpsuits just to demonstrate what good-natured sports they are. Even Meryl Streep doesn’t register here as Meryl Streep, Greatest Actress Of Her Generation; she comes across as a 60-year-old mom acting in a community theatre production, having the time of her life, playing to her friends in the audience, overplaying every emotion, and not making the slightest pretense of inhabiting a character. When you see the actors bursting into song, you respond not to the quality of their performance, but simply to how game these real-life celebrities are to play along, to clown around like regular folks and risk looking a little foolish. If anyone in the film could actually sing or dance, if the slightest hint of wit or sophistication were to appear in the script, or if a single musical number were staged with anything remotely resembling visual flair or comic inventiveness, the whole enterprise would deflate like a punctured volleyball.
I haven’t mentioned the plot at all, because the plot hardly matters—for what it’s worth, it’s about a young bride-to-be (Big Love’s Amanda Seyfried, who spends the whole movie behaving as if she’s barely stifling a fit of the giggles) invites three of her mother’s old flames to her wedding in hopes of discovering which one is her father. What matters are those irresistible ABBA songs, confections as sugary and lightweight as cotton candy, which the actors keep launching into at the slightest provocation, with zero attempt to smooth the transition from speaking to singing.
And those songs just won’t stop coming at you. At the end of what seems like the final number, Streep peers into the audience and asks, “Do you want some more? Do you want us to do another one?!?” As the crowd roared that it did, I knew I was powerless to resist Mamma Mia!’s onslaught. This film-critic Napoleon had met his “Waterloo.”
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