Review: Mamma Mia! The Movie (2/5)

Mamma Mia! The Movie
(Phyllida Lloyd):
Meryl Streep, Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth, Stellan Skarsgård, Julie Walters, Dominic Cooper, Amanda Seyfried, Christine Baranski.
Running time: 108 minutes

Curmudgeon-baiting films don’t come any shinier than Mamma Mia! The Movie, an all-star Abba musical so bright, I found my eyeballs reaching for factor 60 sun cream. This musical approaches you with the plastered-on smile of a demented party organiser: Everything is going to be fun, OK? No long faces up there in the back! Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World had something similar: I think you call it totalitarian happiness.
Meryl Streep stars as Donna, a dungareed hotel owner and single mum marooned in middle-age on a Greek island. The sea sparkles with gold and the sky is honeymoon azure. The place looks like it has been rented from Greek deities, speed-boated off the island for the duration of filming.
Donna enjoys a man-free life and now worries about her daughter Sophie’s wedding. But Sophie (Amanda Seyfried) needs a man to give her away, and she needs to know who her father is. Mammy’s diary reveals she used to be a bit of a slapper, sleeping with three different men on three consecutive nights in the early 1980s. Super trouper! (Oh weren’t we naughty liberals back then.)
So who could her father be? Is it Pierce Brosnan, a man who sings like he gargles daily with sulphuric acid? Is it Colin Firth, wheeling out that upper-class bumbling routine again, or Stellan Skarsgård, who plays a rugged, intrepid explorer?
After a while, you realise nobody really cares. They just want to sing Abba songs.
Streep, out to prove that great actresses don’t always take themselves seriously, leads a congo of dancing queens through village streets, ignoring the peasants and the linen washing, while Julie Walters and Christine Baranski sing into hairdryers.
Mamma Mia is directed by Phyllida Lloyd, who masterminded the stage musical in both the West End and on Broadway. But it’s her first film, and she shows she doesn’t have the Busby Berkeley touch: she does little with the camera to choreograph the anarchy. In one sequence, she applies slow motion, to keep that stiff middle-aged cast hanging balletically in the air.
It made me think of the late Cyd Charisse, who in her heyday, could stay in the air without slow motion, smoke a cigarette, have lunch, ring her agent and touch base again ready for the next take. That was back when musicals had singers and dancers as opposed to A-list actors handpicked for box office draw.
The Abba songs are sung with varying degrees of competence – with the squealy exuberance of a karaoke hen party. And the lyrics lend a whiff of nostalgia and regret. But only a whiff. Phyllida Lloyd has no intention of letting any genuine feeling cast a cloud over her island idyll. The name of the game is happiness! Smile, goddammit!
Thank you for the music, Abba, but I prefer films that earn their feel-good factor, as opposed to having it shoved down my throat.