Mamma Mia!
I was prepared for the incredible silliness of this movie. I was also prepared to have slick Abba pop tunes rattling incessantly around my head for days after. What caught me off guard was the paucity of punchy pop melodies. Aside from the title song and “Dancing Queen”, none of the songs lingered in my head for one moment past the final beat. And I’m a sucker for catchy show tunes: I once listened to the song “Downtown” by Petula Clark 53 times in a row. I never listened to Abba when they were first raging across the pop music landscape, but what I knew (or thought I knew) of them was that theirs were addictive, catchy and slick songs. Now I know I’m not an Abba kind of guy. And judging from the demographics of the audience at the showing I went to, not many guys are Abba kind of guys. Males were outnumbered roughly 20 to 1 (I estimated 80 women for the four men I saw, counting me).
There’s no faulting the performers in this movie. They throw themselves into the syrupy concoction with an almost manic abandon. Smiles and laughter are obligatory. While the story revolves around the upcoming wedding of a young woman (whose name, like the Abba tunes, I’ve forgotten) and her search for her father among three possibilities (Pierce Brosnan, Stellan Skarsgard, Colin Firth), the movie is really about getting those three actors together with Meryl Streep, Christine Baranski, and Julie Walters and letting them have a great time hamming it up with these songs. For the most part their gleeful abandon carries things along. The movie bogs down when it shifts to the younger generation, and also at one particularly weak musical number that Streep delivers with every ounce of her considerable energy and talent but whose choreography and lyrics make things grind to a puzzling halt. (That song is “The Winner Takes it All” in which it seems that Streep’s character is desparately trying to communicate something of great importance to Brosnan’s, but as she is obliged to sing this song, the message is hopelessly lost.) Nevertheless, there is a certain charm in seeing these six talented and mature actors hamming it up in a corny musical on a Greek island. Mamma Mia!
August 14th, 2008 at 3:44 pm
I was coerced into seeing Mamma Mia (the play), which ended up being great… as for the movie version, sounds fun, though it’s awkward to think of ol’ Pierce trying to sing, yeeesh