On a whim I picked up Mamma Mia! at the old video store a night or so ago as the lovely Ms. AlphaLima is a big-time ABBA fan from way back in her middle school days.
We watched it last night.
About five minutes in, right around the scene where the young girls (Sophie and her pals) are reunited on the pier, do you want to know what really went through my head? This is the truth, right here:
“This is one of the nine levels of hell.”
Same deal with the older wimmins’ reunion (Donna and her pals). Ugh. I had to bite my tongue to keep from guffawing right out loud.
As the movie rolled on, my impressions changed some, and here’s why: I figured out that the plot is much like a Shakespearean comedy. It’s complex but simple to grasp, the age-old conflict between the generations is there, it’s all resolved in the end through some credulity-straining events. I believe that Shakespeare has a slight edge in dialogue-writing skillz, however. I also like ABBA, and the music is integrated nicely into the story. There’s a few of those “Uh-oh. I feel a song coming on” moments, but for the most part the music serves as a vehicle to advance the story and flesh out the characters. I also did not realize that Meryl Streep has such a strong singing voice. Yeah, I know there’s probably some Hollywood Trickery in there, but I am equally confident that she is talented. Pierce Brosnan? Not so much.
Check out the scene where she’s headed up to the ridiculously remote church for the wedding (and yeah, I realize there’s probably a real church like that, but its presence does not decrease in the least the impracticality of it–maybe there’s a chairlift up the other side, out of camera range) and she belts out “The Winner Takes It All.” The whole time I’m wondering if she’s going to get blown off the cliff, and she still elicited in me some degree of empathy. The lyrics of the song made sense there, too. In retrospect the scene also makes sense from the Pierce Brosnan character angle as he has loved her all these years, and here she is going through a tough time (and looking GREAT doing it, even with the red scarf all tangled about her. What is this, Ran?). Rock on, Meryl Streep.
On a slightly different note, Freud would have had a field day with the old Mamma Mia! as pretty much every scene features Streep wrangling some phallic object in some way or another–power drill, wine bottle, caulking gun, fifteen different varieties of fake microphone.
Not the greatest movie ever, but I enjoyed watching it (though I feel now as if some of my joy stemmed from the fact that my dear wife was so wholly immersed in that wondrous thing). It was the feel good hit of the Sunday.
