By Tom Elce • Sep 4th, 2008 • Filed under: Film Review, Hollywood, featured

Tom Elce reviews Phyllida Lloyd’s Mamma Mia!

So it was that I went to heaven before I went to hell. Indeed, after watching Christopher Nolan’s brilliant “The Dark Knight” I returned to the cinema about an hour later, forced to endure the miserable mess that is Phyllida Lloyd’s “Mamma Mia!” A poorly choreographed movie musical-cum-tribute to ABBA helmed by a director whose previous body of work is contained entirely in the theatre, the film is an ineptly staged genre film to begin with. The fact that it can’t carry a tune doesn’t help and, as such, the end result is a musical that will do less for the music of ABBA than 2007’s “Across the Universe” did for The Beatles’ tunes.

In a world without paternity tests, soon to be wed 20-year-old Sophie (Amanda Seyfried) invites under false pretenses three potential fathers of hers - Bill (Stellan Skarsgård), Sam (Pierce Brosnan) and Harry (Colin Firth) - along for the wedding ceremony. Having rounded them up at the island on which she is set to get hitched, she intends to weed out her biological father from the threesome. Their reappearance, however, doesn’t go down so well with Sophie’s mother Donna (Meryl Streep), for whom the reemergence of three former lovers brings up old memories and deepens her guilt for not being able to answer her daughter’s paternal questions.

How exactly Sophie expects she’ll be able to identify her father out of three potential parents isn’t clearly established. As with the remainder of the flimsy plot, the idea seems merely an excuse for having the actors perform shoehorned-in ABBA hits to full dance routines and supported choruses. They all act like idiots, basically, behaving much below their ages - Sophie especially comes across more like a twitty early teen than someone into early adulthood - and coming across as uniformly shrill, nobody more so than Donna’s friends and former singing partners Rosie (Julie Walters) and Tanya (Christine Baranski). The film’s idea of being smutty is to have those two make constant sexual references that (pardon the pun) come across as limp.

A whole song routine between Tanya and a much-younger suitor is horrid to watch, not least because the scene seems so pleased with itself.

The story itself doesn’t really go anywhere, instead meandering along in its own aimless way, its idea of action involving characters basically going over and over the same points, arguing over the same things several times without reaching a solution (until, that is, the ending) or basically acting like human jukeboxes. A couple of the tunes are admittedly catchy, as in the performance of the titular track, though the bulk of “Mamma Mia!’”s song-and-dance routines are either obnoxious or not half as funny as they think themselves.

Though her character’s marriage story ultimately takes a backseat to her onscreen mother’s own, far more dull subplot, Amanda Seyfried is memorable for being sheerly terrible as Sophie, broadly emoting whenever subtlety would have been preferred and at other times looking so vacant it’s amazing the film doesn’t cut away to the image of  tumbleweed rolling by. As mother Donna, Meryl Streep is undeniably a fine actress and one of the production’s more capable singers, though
she too is guilty of selling herself short. Supporting her and appearing content with themselves solely by appearance, Julie Walters and Christine Baranski are further illustrations of the cast’s content mediocrity. As for their singing, it, like so many of the others’, leaves a lot to be desired. Of the male parts, Pierce Brosnan butchers every song he sings but nonetheless does fine essaying Sam Carmichael, while Colin Firth does decent work as Harry. Stellan Skarsgård, finally, barely registers as Bill.

Perhaps wanting to be this year’s “Hairspray” but lacking the energy and wit of that film, “Mamma Mia!” seems to consider itself passable by association with ABBA music. It’s an unambitious failure, making little effort to supplement the plot with logic or the characters with a fully-functioning brain, telling a story that could never have had a decent cinematic resolution and sticking its tongue so forcefully into its own cheek that it tears a whole and leaves a bloody mess. I remember laughing once, though it was a fleeting one that I can’t, for the life of me, associate with a particular moment in a film so unmemorable that it is already evaporating from my conscious.

My Rating:

Directed by Phyllida Lloyd
Cast: Meryl Streep, Amanda Seyfried, Colin Firth, Stellan Skarsgård,
Pierce Brosnan, Christine Baranski, Julie Walters, Juan Pablo Di Pace,
Dominic Cooper, George Georgiou, Dylan Turner, Chris Jarvis, Enzo
Squillino Jr., Clare Louise Connolly

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