Oh my Mamma Mia!!!

The movie musical is a rather tricky thing. Cinema tends to deal with a certain level of realism. Many people will never be able to accept characters breaking into song, especially when they’re dealing with serious matters. Mamma Mia! succeeds because it doesn’t deal with serious matters, letting the sheer campy joy of the songs do most of work. 

Twenty year-old Sophie is about to get married, and she’s determined to have her father give her away at the wedding. The problem is that she doesn’t know who her father is. After reading her mother’s diary, she narrows it down to three suspects. She invites all three of them to the wedding without telling her mother, believing that she’ll know her father when she sees him. But when all three show up, and Sophie can’t tell, the wedding becomes a little more than all of them can handle. 

The plot, if we’re being generous about it, is really thin. The original musical wasn’t really a narrative force to begin with, but the film trims it down even further, just barely maintaining enough story elements to keep some semblance of plot. But let’s be honest: this is a story based on the music of ABBA, and for the most part, it works. It works because the film is so adamantly cheesy, so free from pretension that you just start letting things go. You start to forgive the film for things like a lack of character development, broad, easy humor, and flat dialogue, because it never pretends to be anything more than it is. It doesn’t quibble with themes, doesn’t pretend that it’s giving us a timeless love story, or a grand meditation on life. It is unabashedly frivolous and lacking in gravity. At its core, it’s just people singing ABBA songs, and that’s okay. 

Unless you don’t like ABBA, of course. Then it’s not okay at all. The film’s not going to change your mind about them. On the filmmaking side of things, there isn’t really much to say. Director Phyllida Lloyd clearly doesn’t have much experience with film. Her scenes mostly play out like they were still on stage. Some pretty scenery perks up a couple of frames, but a lot of it is remarkably flat. Lloyd relies solely on the production design to keep her film visually interesting, and it isn’t really enough. She does make up for a lot of her filmmaking deficiencies by injecting the film with a ton of unbridled joy, and for some people, it would be easy enough to just get caught up in all of it. 

Is there really anything left to say about Meryl Streep? I will say that in this film, she attacks every song with enough gusto that she manages to make The Winner Takes It All work. Amanda Seyfried, who plays Sophie, is just stunning, and this movie might finally make her the star that she deserves to be. Pierce Brosnan may want to retire from acting and just spend the rest of his days singing Disco hits, because he looks like he’s having a lot of fun here. Colin Firth spends the movie being Colin Firth, which people seem to find charming. 

Mamma Mia! isn’t really great cinema, but it doesn’t need to be. A good bunch of movie musicals get caught up with trying to be epic love stories or having some sort of profound insight, and they fall flat because all the singing inevitably clashes with the gravity of what they’re trying to address, and you just can’t solve life’s mysteries by singing pop songs. Mamma Mia! seems terribly aware of this fact, and skips the inevitable dash of pretension in favor of the outright cheesy camp flavor that only ABBA can bring. The production, for all its flaws, succeeds in bringing a lot of unmitigated nostalgic joy to the screen. It’s probably not for everyone, but joy is hardly ever a bad thing.