Possibly the result of too many staged musical productions having been brought to the silver screen in the past few years -- Rent, The Producers, to name a few -- Mamma Mia has unfortunately suffered from a case of audience ennui, from expecting too much, from so popular an item.
Synopsis of Mamma Mia
Mamma Mia, a love story which haphazardly incorporates famous ABBA songs into a love story set in the beautiful Greek islands, tells of young Sophie Sheridan (Amanda Seyfried), who is about to marry her beau, Sky (Dominic Cooper). Having lived in a perpetual fixer-upper of an inn with her independent mother Donna (Meryl Streep, in a rare failure on screen), Sophie decides to invite three men from her mother's past, having read of them in her mother's secret diary.
Sending the wedding invites off to all three men (played by Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth and Stellan Skarsgard) under the pretense of writing to them as her mother, Sophie convinces all three to attend her wedding, as she believes one of them may be her father, as all three had past dalliances with Donna. She writes of a chance to renew old ties, lulling them into a possible rekindling of their respective past romances with the feisty single mother.
Many hi-jinks ensue, as the game of who's who, and why, unfolds around the final wedding preparations. And oh yes, all of it is played out while half the cast belt out ABBA tunes the audience has heard countless times since the band's heyday in the late 1970's, wondering if there's any connection at all to the music.
Problems with Mamma Mia
To say there are a few isues with the film is a definite understatement. For one, the cast can't carry a tune, save perhaps for the film's poster girl, Amanda Seyfried. That she alone opens up and closes the film, in bookend intonations of "I Have a Dream", seems almost like an exercise in irony. Within the first few scenes in which we are introduced to the major players, the audience may feel like they too have a dream, one of a capable cast, with a modicum of singing ability, or at least basic training thereof.
Two of the worst culprits in this movie are Streep and Brosnan. Though you are touched by their declarations of renewed love as the film reaches its climactic wedding scene, one goes slightly cross-eyed each time Brosnan opens his mouth to warble a note, mangling line after line of each song he contributes to. As for Streep, you almost get the impression she's singing off key on purpose, to help cover her co-stars's lack of singing talent.
The rest of the cast doesn't fare much better, as we are treated to the worst screen singing since Eastwood in Paint Your Wagon. If a studio goes forward with the intent of mounting a massive film version of a very successful stage show, perhaps their main goal would be not to focus so much on marquee names, but rather whether they can sound any better than a pack of howling dogs. The mutts in Disney's Lady and the Tramp sound marginally better, by comparison.
Many of the secondary players try to speak their lines through the music, in vintage Shatner spoken-word style, to no avail. Their fair attempts simply don't excuse poor execution overall.
Furthermore, the film doesn't even try to incorporate the known hits of ABBA into its storyline, it almost seems to pick them at random, whenever the story stalls. This movie should have learned a few pointers from Julie Taymor's Across the Universe, which impressively and seamlessly weaved awesome Beatles' hits into a storyline designed to maximize the songs' meanings, into a valid and enjoyable story. Not so in this film, as Meryl Streep's financial woes in keeping up with inn repairs just don't warrant the use of "Money Money Money".
Mamma Mia Overall Analysis
Granted, the writers of this film had to work with the existing premise from the stage show, however that in itself doesn't necessarily fly, either. One must wonder if the writers of the original play had seen TV's Lace and Lace II, which were TV movies of the early 1980's. In those telefilms, young Phoebe Cates played a young sex symbol, who went off in search of which of three women was her mother, followed by a similar search for her father in the sequel. The premise is too similar to be coincidence, but let us not digress; suffice to say, older viewers of this film will likely make this unusual connection as well.
Despite the use of great locations for its setting, a fairly gifted cast of actors (other notables are Julie Walters and Christine Baranski) as well as an almost automatic appeal to both hardcore ABBA fans, as wel as seasoned fans of the stage hit, Mamma Mia is very painful to watch. Some stage shows should never be put onto celluloid, unless it's directed by a seasoned pro, like Robert Wise (who directed the memorable Sound of Music).
4.5 out of 10, for being an affront to the ears of people everywhere.
 |
