Mamma Mia, Here I Go Again

The new movie Mamma Mia, based on the ABBA musical, is a chick flick—no question about it. But I’m in touch with my feminine side, so I went with The Mrs. over the weekend without a second thought. Here’s the trailer.

As you can probably gather, Mamma Mia is relentlessly upbeat and silly, and several reviews I’ve seen criticize it for its pace. Had it run another 15 minutes, it could have become exhausting, but it clocked in at an admirable one hour and 48 minutes. There’s an awful lot of jumping around and squealing, although some of the physical humor is pretty funny. The film’s jokes are more smilers than laughers, except maybe during the closing sequence that accompanies the credits. Some reviewers criticize the movie for being sugary sweet, but this is ABBA we’re talking about, so that’s like criticizing water for getting you wet. The sugary-sweetest part belongs to Amanda Seyfried, who plays Sophie, the girl around whose wedding the plot revolves. Although critics seem to like her, I found her giddy enthusiasm extremely annoying, and it dawned on me afterward that my favorite parts of the movie were the ones in which she’s involved the least.

I didn’t like it as much as I liked the stage production, but I couldn’t hate it, because every few minutes it would roll out one of those monster hooks ABBA’s famous for, and my resistance would melt: “Dancing Queen,” “Super Trouper,” “S.O.S” (which even a non-singer like Pierce Brosnan could bring home) and so on. I’m an absolute sucker for that stuff, and there’s not a damn thing I can do about it. Meryl Streep’s performance of “The Winner Takes It All,” the saddest thing ABBA ever recorded, blew me away in the theater, at least the first three-quarters of it. Streep’s a multiple Oscar winner who knows how to inhabit a part, and while she’s singing that song, she’s living through the pain of it. Except at the end she went all Celine Dion, which spoiled it a little.

There was a time when actors in Hollywood musicals were not expected to sing. In two of the most famous musicals of all time, West Side Story and My Fair Lady, Natalie Wood and Audrey Hepburn didn’t sing a note; their voices were dubbed by Marni Nixon—who is, among her accomplishments, the mother of singer/songwriter Andrew Gold. Nowadays, however, actors do their own singing, whether they’re capable of it or not. Streep had already proven she could sing in A Prairie Home Companion. Brosnan performs bravely, but he’s no David Hasselhoff. The other male leads, Colin Firth and Stellan Skarsgaard, sang less, and that’s a good thing.

If you’re a guy, and there’s somebody at your house who wants to see Mamma Mia, take ‘em. It won’t hurt you, and you’ll probably be able to use the points you’ll score come football season.