Phyllida Lloyd (2008)
Technically inept in ways you rarely notice in a big budget film. Whenever a number involves more than a couple of people, it always ends up as a frenetic, crowded mess in terms of movement (choreography is hardly the word). The relentlessness of the ABBA songs, even if they are mostly abbreviated, works against expectations that the numbers in a musical will be high points. The script is nonsense in terms of the apparent ages of the characters vs the past events that trigger the story. In some ways, it isn’t like a film at all – more animated karaoke. Not surprisingly, this is more than enough for many people to reject the picture in toto. But, in spite of everything, Mamma Mia! is really enjoyable. It does deliver on one of the essential qualities of a screen musical – characters expressing heightened emotion through song and dance. It supplies the variety of pleasures to be had in singing and dancing by actors not known as singers or dancers – and ABBA’s melodious impersonality means that you can listen to these renditions without worrying that the originals are being travestied. And because the main performers are such a bizarre collection in terms of their respective filmographies (a dream cast in the sense of an unaccountable assortment) – and because they’re far from young – there’s a palpable sense of their understanding that this is a one-off experience and that they’re determined to have a ball. Which they do.
Sally and I saw the film on a rainy Saturday afternoon in Edinburgh. Given my enthusiasms for Edinburgh and Meryl Streep (and, to a slightly lesser extent, ABBA), it might seem a safe bet that I would like Mamma Mia! and I was even better disposed to it after reading ludicrous reviews in the Guardian and the Independent on the train up to Scotland – ludicrous not least because the snotty authors seemed to assess the film against serious dramatic criteria and, in order to demolish it, felt they had to explain the plot in some detail (and then dismiss it). It goes without saying that the ‘storyline’ is a highly primitive framework for the songs and one sentence is enough. Mamma Mia! is about the lead-up to the wedding of Sophie, whose mother Donna runs a taverna on a Greek island and who, in her youth, had affairs with three men, any of one of whom might be the daughter’s father, all three of whom Sophie has invited to the nuptials in the hope of finding out more. Donna is played by Meryl Streep. The three men are Sam (Pierce Brosnan), Harry (Colin Firth) and Bill (Stellan Skarsgård). Two of Donna’s friends, Tanya (Christine Baranski) and Rosie (Julie Walters), are also among the wedding guests.
When Pierce Brosnan sings ‘SOS’ – a tune that is one of the best examples of Benny Andersson’s ear for delicate plangency – the fact that Brosnan can’t really sing makes this duet with Meryl Streep more expressive: his vocal limitations are fused with an I’m-doing-the-best-I-can urgency. The fact that Streep can sing has the effect of creating a distance between them; the lyrics of the song are charmingly (and amusingly) dramatised. We know from Silkwood and Postcards from the Edge and A Prairie Home Companion that Streep can not only sing but sing in character. I’d always found ‘The Winner Takes It All’ – as a pop single – tediously, mechanically melodramatic (it was originally released at the time of the Moscow Olympics). As a number in a film musical, interpreted by a great actress, it’s transformed. It would be daft to pretend that Donna is a substantial dramatic role but the athletic demands of the part – or the way in which she’s decided to play it, at any rate – are such that we see Meryl Streep, in her sixtieth year, more physically reckless than she’s ever been on screen before. (It’s going to be a considerable irony of film history that Mamma Mia!, and its huge box office success, have given Streep, long admired without being much loved by mass audiences, popularity on a scale she’s never previously had.)
Julie Walters’ ability to make her characters seem true prevails even here – and even though part of the pleasure of hearing her sing ABBA numbers in a big screen musical is the sense of her amused, incredulous self-awareness in doing so. She does some great physical comedy (especially trying and failing to keep her balance in a dinghy). As Bill, the man she sets her sights on, Stellan Skarsgård is relaxed and genial. It’s evident that Christine Baranski is a more professionally assured musical performer than some of her co-stars – although I didn’t like her big number, ‘Does Your Mother Know?’ The lyrics are adjusted so that it’s sung to a young boy rather than a young girl; the staging seems to make fun of the older woman, which is both unkind and completely unjust, given how good Baranski looks. Among the six principals, Colin Firth sticks out as wrong: this is partly inevitable – he looks a generation younger than the other five. But it’s also partly because Firth, either through misjudgment or lack of self-confidence, chooses to play Harry as if there were a proper character there.
It’s more difficult for the younger performers who, by definition, don’t have the range of associations on which their seniors can draw. Even so, they’re dreary: as Sophie, Amanda Seyfried is competent but, in a sizeable part, her repertoire of gesture and facial expression is very limited (it might have been better to cast a less technically accomplished, more naturally expressive performer). Dominic Cooper, as her fiancé Sky (sic), is as charmless here as in The History Boys. The two bridesmaids (Ashley Lilley and Rachel McDowall) are hideously effortful, an effect made worse by the director’s predilection for close-up – as if that was the only way of keeping control.
Phyllida Lloyd directed Mamma Mia! in the West End and on Broadway but she shows no aptitude at all for working behind a camera (this is her first feature). It’s not just the presence of Julie Walters that brings to mind ‘Acorn Antiques’ in some of the set-ups. The visual possibilities in the locations are largely wasted; no thought has been given to how the colours of set decoration and costume are going to work together. Technical limitations aside, Lloyd comes up with some breathtakingly stupid details: Dominic Cooper is given a cigar as a prop for ‘Lay All Your Love On Me’ – for no other reason than to make sense of the lyric “You thought that smoking was my only vice”. It’s a pretty desperate idea to start with but it might at least have been pot rather than a panatella. Yet perhaps this ineptness contributes to the success of the film. It has a numbing effect: after a while, if you’re well disposed to Mamma Mia!, you get used to it – but you stay alert to the fantastic performing talents on the screen. The slackness and lack of daring of the photography and editing mean at least that the numbers aren’t splintered in pyrotechnic fragments as in Chicago or Moulin Rouge! And, thanks to the magic of screen chemistry, the climax to the story works. You don’t really care who Sophie’s father is but you do want the man who meant most to her mother to emerge – and the connection between Meryl Streep and Pierce Brosnan leaves no room for doubt who that is. This means that the wedding scene, which is hopelessly clumsy, is emotionally satisfying too.
12 July 2008
