July 20, 2008

MOVIES: Mamma Mia! (Phyllida Lloyd, 2008)

The ABBA musical comes to the big screen.

Meryl Streep stars as Donna, who runs a small guest villa on a Greek island; her daughter, Sophie (Amanda Seyfried) is about to be married. Sophie has never known her father, but after stealing her mother's diary from the crucial summer, has figured out that there are three possible dads out there, and she's invited them all to the wedding.

Despite the fact that none of them has spoken to Donna in 20 years, or ever even met Sophie, they all show up (in the forms of Colin Firth, Pierce Brosnan, and Stellan Skarsgard). Also arriving for the festivities are Donna's old sidekicks and one-time backup singers, Christine Baranski and Julie Walters.

There's lots of groups of three in this movie. Streep and her pals; the three potential dads; Sophie and her bridesmaids; the groom and his groomsmen (though we don't see too much of them). It all begins to feel vaguely Shakespearean, and you have the sense that the movie's going to end in some horrifying sextuple wedding. It doesn't go quite that far, thank goodness, but things are wrapped up in awfully tidy fashion.

Director Phyllida Lloyd doesn't have the slightest clue about the differences between directing for the stage and directing for the movies; she's instructed everyone here to give enormous performances as if they're emoting to the back row. Some of the actors have enough skill to get away with this, and manage to come off as merely charmingly hammy; Baranski and Streep come off best, and Seyfried isn't too bad. But most of the cast is overacting badly, gesturing wildly with every line of dialogue and clubbing us over the head with every obvious punchline; Walters is by far the worst offender.

As for the songs, they are (as they always were) entertaining, well-crafted bits of fluffy pop, but they've been shoehorned into a plot into which they don't always fit comfortably. The best numbers are those in which the characters just sing for fun -- a bachelorette-party performance of "Super Trouper" by Donna and the Dynamos is nicely done -- or which have absolutely nothing to do with the main plot -- Baranski steals the movie when she sings "Does Your Mother Know" to a beach full of shirtless young studs.

("Shirtless" reminds me in a sort of backwards way that the movie's costuming is one of its strengths, especially in its more flamboyant moments. During that "Super Trouper" number, Baranski and Walters wear epaulets that look as if Shih Tzus have died on their shoulders. There's a beautiful shot of Streep standing at the prow of a yacht with miles of fabric billowing behind her -- think Priscilla, Queen of the Titanic. And the outfits worn by all of the principal players in the closing-credits sequence are spectacularly gaudy rock-star creations.)

The cast varies in its musical ability, though they are all at least able to carry a tune reasonably well. The women come off better than the men, and Brosnan could have used a few sessions with a vocal coach, which might have gotten his voice out of his throat and made him sound less like a strangled frog.

But the movie's biggest problem is its tone. Mamma Mia isn't so much a movie to be watched as it is a movie to be endured. From the first frame, the movie screams at you: "This is a really fun movie, isn't it? Isn't it? Why aren't you having fun yet? Why? Why? Why??????" There are a few brief moments when the movie finds a comfortably campy style, but they are so few and so brief that the audience never has time to relax before the assault begins again. You'd be better off staying at home and digging out your copy of ABBA Gold.

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