Mamma Mia! Movie Review (2008)

Directed by Phyllida Lloyd, written by Catherine Johnson, 108 minutes, rated PG-13.

You could spend all week eating bacon at a pig farm and still find more ham in the new Phyllida Lloyd musical, “Mamma Mia!,” an irrepressible, unstoppable kaleidoscope of karaoke camp gone berserk that features a cast happily mainlining the more popular offerings in ABBA’s songbook.

And what a songbook.

Back in the 70s, when those ultra-glam Swedes first hit the scene in their silver lame pantsuits, glossy lips, camel toes and mod hair, they delivered such a fresh, catchy brand of pop music, it combusted into one of the great guilty pleasures of our time.

I don’t know what they were smoking back then--or what bootleg bottle of absinthe they got hold of--but whatever it was, it made for songs that are so unshakable, they’d chase you down the street if they could. Actually, they can. The energy behind them is enough to solve our current energy crisis--let ABBA power your home--and much like the movie itself, the lyrics driving them are so bad, they’re good.

Based on the Broadway musical of the same name, “Mamma Mia!” stars Meryl Streep as Donna, a former hippie who now toils in the hotel trade on a beautiful Greek island, where her daughter, Sophie (Amanda Seyfried), is about to have one big, fat Greek wedding when she marries the love of her life, Sky (Dominic Cooper).

Since Sophie never has met her father but wants more than anything to have him walk her down the aisle, she does a little snooping in her mother’s diary and finds within its heated pages three men who could be that man. They are Sam (Pierce Brosnan), Bill (Stellan Skarsgard) and Harry (Colin Firth), all of whom Sophie sends an invitation to the wedding, and all of whom arrive prepared to play catch-up with Donna. The problem is that these men don’t know what Sophie is up to, and neither does Donna, whose face falls the moment she’s faced with her past--and all it could mean to her present.

Getting her through it are her two best girlfriends. There’s Tanya (Christine Baranski), who favors Botox, frequent divorces and boy toys; and Rosie (Julie Walters), a fiery cougar dynamo who once accompanied Tanya in being Donna’s backup singer in Donna & the Dynamos.

The rest of the plot is a whirlwind--too much to explore here, but all of which uses ABBA’s songs to tell its story. While it’s true that the film’s chronology never adds up, it’s best not to question it or the other moments of failed logic. This is a messy, shoot-for-the-moon-or-bust movie, with everyone so determined to deliver a good time, they go to great lengths to do just that.

You’ve never seen such commitment, which is a good reason for the exclamation point at the end of the film’s title. It didn’t happen there by accident.

Take, for instance, Brosnan. Like a doomed canary, he couldn’t sing his way out of a toxic coal mine, but you have to give it to him for going for it and for bravely blasting his share of bad gas. Streep, however, is just as good as you expect--like everyone else here, she’s loose and game, throwing down the hits in ways that are either fiercely entertaining (stay to the very end to find out just how entertaining) or, in one nicely staged scene she shares opposite Sam along a rocky precipice, surprisingly moving when she launches into “The Winner Takes it All.”

“Mamma Mia!” isn’t for everyone, but what movie is? Fans of the film’s cast, ABBA’s transporting music and those eager to give themselves over to the ripe presentation of the material likely won’t be disappointed.

Grade: B+