Starring Meryl Streep, Amanda Seyfried. Written by Catherine Johnson, directed by Phyllida Lloyd. 180 min.
Any bride-to-be has enough problems, without inviting three potential illegitimate fathers to her ceremony. But such is the catalyst for Mamma Mia!, based on the successful Broadway musical, with original playwright Catherine Johnson and stage director Phyllida Lloyd back at the helm.
After snooping in her mother’s diary, 20-year-old Sophie (played with youthful exuberance by Amanda Seyfried) deduces that her mystery father could be one of three ex-lovers (Colin Firth, Pierce Brosnan, Stellan Skarsgard) her mother Donna (Meryl Streep) “dot dot dotted” during her wayward years. A failed music career and romance behind her, Donna is the manager of a fledgling hotel on a sultry Greek island who doesn’t know her past is about to meet a head-on collision with her present. Scored to a soundtrack of ABBA’s greatest hits, summer blockbusters don’t get any frothier than this.
Lloyd’s stagy literalism is ultimately the film’s downfall, reliant on broad theatrical gestures and set pieces to awkwardly fit songs like “Money Money Money” into a piecemeal narrative. While most cast members do Bjorn Ulvaes proud (save Brosnan, who needs to enunciate), the cheese-factor reaches feta levels when gal pal Christine Barasanki seduces a cabana boy to “Does Your Mother Know?”, uneasily complemented by high school musical-worthy choreography. With lighting and camerawork that recall Xanadu, the film’s charms come from the patentable joy of ABBA. A sprawling, spreeing “Dancing Queen” lets the cast take to the shore, while use of a Greek chorus as comic relief is a source of few reliable guffaws.
But this is still Streep’s movie. Her blowsy Earth mother is overdrawn but relatible, with an interpretation of “The Winner Takes It All” as an elegy for doomed romance that had the woman next to me literally tearing up. I’ll admit, I sniffled once or twice. It’s a tour-de-force performance on par with The Devil Wears Prada, humanizing pop culture with pop itself.