Mamma Mia!

The scene opens at a famous Hollywood restaurant: a production pitch at lunch for a new version of Grease. After the second martini they get to the casting, and breathlessly it is suggested that Renee Fleming and Roberto Alagna would be PERFECT for the leads. As fourth martinis are lifted, murmurs of "genius" are heard.

When a slight fairy tale is played like Aeschylus, there are borders crossed. (Perhaps a musical "Disney" with Al Pacino and Dame Judi Dench as Mickey and Minnie Mouse would satisfy.) Mamam Mia! mounts an assault on whimsy loaded for bear: Meryl Streep (Donna, a former singer), Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth, and Stellan Skarsgard (as three former flames of Donna's), and Julie Walters and Christine Baranski (former Donna accompanists and now friends) impersonate Broadway gypsies frothily singing (?) and dancing (?) across a panorama of several square miles of scenery. Where is CGI when you really need it? In this film version of the internationally staged adaptation of ABBA songs (by Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus) screenwriter Catherine Johnson and director Phyllida Lloyd -- both holdovers from the stage -- stitch a wispy story together (a fatherless 18-year-old about to marry (Amanda Seyfried) wants to find her father among three candidates) around otherwise unrelated songs. But where the the concept seems to call for stitching with delicate thread, here they employ industrial rope. Where ten chorus members would do, one hundred are better, even if spastically photographed. It's hard for a Greek chorus---literally--of seeming thousands awkwardly attempting spontaneity to bring Aeschylus fully to dramatic life. It all comes out as dancing queens. Using Streep and Brosnan when Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake in age makeup are more appropriate is to overfill a weak vessel. The more these excellent actors do, and try to do well, the more inappropriate it is.

Perhaps worried (subconsciously) that her stars might overwhelm the material, the director seems to have instructed the choreographer (Anthony Van Laast) to stage every gesture, raised eyebrow, licked lip, etc.; the choreography has been choreographed. And occasionally even these able actors stumble. Skarsgaard in some scenes mugs enough to bring the cows home. His look of "What am I DOING here?" speaks volumes. Brosnan stands by as Streep sings him a ballad, and his attempt to react with hand gestures on face, twitching eyebrows, eye flutters, and looks askance become pitiable. As Streep's best pals, Walters and Baranski do their best, but asking Baranski to make credible a middle-aged dalliance with a practically teen-aged young man is to meanly debase an extravagant talent.

Or perhaps "subconscious" is the wrong term. When the final scene opens in a last singing reunion of Donna and the Dynamos (Walters and Baranski) en costume of spangles and swirling skirts that would make Liberace blush, followed by the boys in similar dishabille, we have a parody that would shame the combined "Gong Show/ American Idol."

Let's not talk about the dancing.

                                                              Howard Buck