December 29, 2010: Mamma Mia
I hadn’t necessarily planned to see Mamma Mia (2008), but I had been intrigued, since I like ABBA music as much as any other person even though nobody is allowed to admit it for some reason. The DVD turned out to be available for everyone to watch when we were staying with family over the holidays. Mamma Mia doesn’t turn out to be anything greater than what you might expect of it, but it has some surprisingly genuine moments, and the lively music and compact run-time make this one OK.
Based on the stage play of the same name and populated by a ridiculous number of snippets of ABBA songs, the film is far from flawless, from the stagey conceit of the main story (a daughter about to marry, who secretly invites to her wedding the three men who may be her father based on her sneak peeks at her mother’s diary) to the awkward misunderstandings and slapstick shenanigans as they try to keep the secret from the mother until the wedding day and the daughter tries to get to know the three men and figure out which one is actually her father. But the story wisely decides in the end to let go of the answer to that question, and everyone is having enough fun and learning enough about themselves that the whole thing comes off as being more heartwarming than it has the right to be.
The anchoring presence of Meryl Streep goes a long way in making this all work, as the labouring single mom (she runs a resort hotel in a Greek island paradise, which makes for a conveniently amazing backdrop) who just wants the best for her daughter while forgetting that doing the best for herself would help things a lot. Reunited with former beaus Stellan Skarsgård, Pierce Brosnan and Colin Firth and remembering old times with them, she clearly had (and still has) her pick of the available men, and begins to wonder whether the things that broke them up were really as devastating as she originally thought, and perhaps her standards were unrealistically high. Seeing her daughter heading perhaps in the opposite direction and marrying very young, Streep really isn’t enthusiastic about the wedding until she comes around to realizing that perhaps young love can be real and is worth sticking with.
So people have lots of side conversations, and folks are hidden away in secret rooms to avoid being discovered by others, and none of it is very realistic and it’s all pretty hokey but it’s fun enough. The ABBA music lends itself well to a musical production, since there are a bunch of catchy big hits to keep the energy level up but the group’s catalogue is big enough that there’s a song or a lyric to cover just about any sentiment which needs to be dealt with. The film at times can’t decide whether or not it wants to go “full slapstick”, and wisely mostly stays away from it, but this does make the whole thing in a way somewhat more awkward because we’re asked to take some contrived situations more at face value than we should have to. The mercifully short running time tempers most of these issues, so before you start to think too much about it, everyone is with who they should be with and a wedding has happened and it all turned out OK. Mamma Mia was more than the little timewaster I expected it to be, but not enough more that I’ll dispute anyone’s negative reviews of it. Oh, and Pierce Brosnan’s singing was indeed as bad as you heard it was.
Streep could bring weight to feathers.
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