Phyllida Lloyd, the woman who brought the smash cultural phenomenon Mamma Mia to the stage, may know everything there is to know about the theater and that’s fine, but she seems to know next to nothing about filmmaking, and that’s not.
The film version's ad campaign proudly boasted that it was made by the same group of women who put it on stage, which would make sense. Who else, after all, should know the material better than the people who created it? Having seen the finished product, they should be embarrassed to even have their names on it at all.
The Plot
It’s the night before Sophie’s (Amanda Seyfried) wedding. She lives at a hotel on a Greek island that her mother Donna (Merly Streep) runs. Sophie has one wish: for her real father to give her away.
Trouble is that her mom won’t tell her who he actually is, and so, after finding one of Donna’s old diaries, decides to invite the three possible men that could be her father. They are: the adventurous Bill (Stellan Skarsgard), the meek Harry (Colin Firth) and the strapping Sam (Pierce Brosnan).
None of them have ever met Sophie, who plans to surprise her mom at her wedding with their presence, making her admit who her real dad is. That’s basically the gist of the whole thing, which piles one contrivance on top of the next.
This entire story sits uneasily atop what Roger Ebert refers to as the Idiot Plot, where, if one character would just tell someone their intentions, it would save everyone a lot of trouble. But alas, to keep the story going, Sophie has it in her head to keep her plans only to herself, deceiving her mother, her friends, her possible father, etc. Idiot indeed.
The Music
All of this is set to some popular Abba songs. The songs are fine, but unfortunately they don’t seem to take much of an active part in advancing the plot. They are just kind of there for show. Maybe it’s because Lloyd doesn’t provide them with any weight and we’re not exactly convinced of their necessity.
There are no big musical sequences or dance numbers, not much group choreography, no sweeping moments, no uplifting renditions in Mamma Mia. Despite the energy that went into making it, the film isn’t really that much fun. That’s too bad because, without the energy of the songs carrying it, the transparent plot sits there, until finally just giving up on itself.
The Verdict
Mamma Mia is a straight up mess from beginning to end; a hodge-podge of indiscriminate elements all working against each other. It’s probably Lloyd’s fault. She lacks the courage or ambition to do anything interesting with the cinematic forum.
Lloyd works in polar extremes. She is either hot or cold, black or white, on or off, etc. When the film is being funny it plays like parody, and when serious it plays like cottage cheese, and the contractions cancel each other out: it’s neither funny nor serious enough; there is either too much going on at once or not enough.
Example: Dancing Queen is a lively number, but the sloppy choreography gets lost in the chaos until Streep ends up in the water. But then, during The Winner Takes it All, which should be a powerful emotional moment, Lloyd leaves Streep in a static position to fiddle with her shawl, while Brosnan stands idly by, falling in and out of the frame as the camera slowly wanders in all directions for no reason.
It's like that early silent British film adaptation of Hamlet where the cameraman was so incompetent that he fails to pan and loses Hamlet off screen, dooming the scene. That's probably not the effect they were going for.
So then why does Llyod, who directed the thing on stage in the first place, spend so much time finding ways to work around the songs, when every director of musicals must surely know that they should be the focus of every scene?
Here, whole musical numbers are reduced to being the background accompaniment to montages (Our Last Summer) or are circumvented by dramatic scenes that are going on somewhere else (Gimme Gimme Gimme). It’s bad enough that only two of the 20 or so songs are actually choreographed dance numbers, but for the woman who should know how they work the best to use them as garnish at the outskirts of a plot so thin and contrived that it ceases to exist without them, is near heresy.
Confined to the intimacy of a stage, in front of a live audience, Iit's possible that Mamma Mia could potentially be a lot of fun. However, in the big open spaces of the filmed frame Mamma Mia would have been much improved were Tim Burton to sick Sweeney Todd on it.
Rating: 2 out of 5
