So THIS is what they mean by "chick flick"...

I love Abba. I love movie musicals. I love Meryl Streep. I love hunky guys in swimming trunks. So Mamma Mia should have been a drop kick (and BTW, I'm gay, so is that the right sports metaphor?). It wasn't. It was pretty close to being terrible. Of course, I found the stage show close to terrible; what saved it was the sheer ecstasy of hearing Abba music performed live. The movie doesn't even have that "live" pleasure, though the songs are generally performed in a way that is close to the originals.

The plot has a clever premise: a girl who was raised by her single mother invites three men she suspects might be her father to her wedding on a Greek island (where she and her mom run a hotel), hoping to find out which one is the real McCoy. However, more effort went into how to work Abba songs in rather than to the plot machinations, so the narrative is mostly a slow-moving bust. I would have thought that filmmakers with Meryl Streep at their disposal would have tried a little harder to give the film some more substance or wit, but no. So Streep and all the rest of the cast are left like fish flopping around on dry land trying to get a little wet--OK, that's a tortured comparison, but you get it.


Streep sings very well (her "The Winner Takes It All" is quite good, if a little too melodramatic) but seems uncomfortable otherwise, resorting to lots of hand-wringing and facial squirming when she has to cavort or become emotional. It's a cartoon part and she gives a cartoon performance. Slightly better are the three men (Colin Firth, Stellan Skarsgard, and especially Pierce Brosnan) and the two female sidekicks (Julie Walters and the fabulous Christine Baranski, who almost steals the show with a racy "Does Your Mother Know?"). Frankly, the best performance comes from young Amanda Seyfried (pictured above) as the bride in question; she brings some actual emotional heft to her inadequately-plotted predicament. Her fiance, Dominic Cooper (below), is nice eye candy.


My partner and I saw this movie in a relatively full medium-sized theater auditorium and we were 2 out of only 5 males in the room, the others being two middle-aged husbands accompanying their wives and a boy there with his mom or sister, I'm guessing. I'm usually fine with "chick flicks"; I may not often seek out wedding films, but I do generally like romantic comedies. I even liked My Big Fat Greek Wedding well enough, not that I'd want to sit through it a second time. But aside from the Abba music, the appeal of this film escaped me. I wanted to like it, and kind of assumed I'd be singing in the aisles, but instead I was mostly looking at my watch and appreciating the lovely Greek scenery. The direction and cinematography are terrible, almost amateurish, and the choreography only sporadic--too often, people are left just sort of leaping around (like the above-mentioned fish). Thankfully, in the aftermath, I now have Abba songs fresh in my head for a few days and that's a plus in my book.