The First Sin Of Musical Conversion!!!!
Hiring the stage director who doesn’t have the slightest idea how to shoot a movie and has no real understanding of why a movie is NOT simply the stage show on film.
And this is, simply, why Mamma Mia! is a pretty terrible movie.
Worse than Rent. Worse than Annie (a movie with three numbers that really work and an overall tone that does not). But it is one step better than the conversion of The Producers, as it is a jukebox musical and actually requires very little sophistication… just more than Phyllida Lloyd could deliver from behind a movie camera.
I had a hard time getting a handle on what exactly they were going for with this mélange of beautiful settings, terrible green screen (or whatever technique they used to leave massive lines around the actors’ heads when they were looking out onto the sea from the hotel), overt breaking out in song, 60-is-the-new-45 casting, big energy, little consistency, a stunning amount of obvious ADR-ed/dubbed dialogue scenes like we haven’t seen/heard in an American movie in a long, long time, and the bravest performance of Pierce Brosnan’s career since anyone who sings like that choosing to expose himself to the public is daring indeed.
After about 30 minutes, it hit me. They were making an AIP beach movie… Gidget Goes Grecian… How To Stuff A Wild Souvlaki… Marital Beach Party. It’s meant to be rollicking, cheesy, brain-dead good fun.
I’m not kidding. There is a distinct filmmaking style that suggests that they looked at these films as a template. (Exec Producer Tom Hanks has also shown his interest in that period, including with his own directorial debut, That Thing You Do.) The problem is that the filmmaking doesn’t deliver on that either. Ms. Lloyd just doesn’t know what she is doing with the camera. She leaves some very talented people hanging in the breeze as she fails to understand the language of film and how to support the ideas of her actors’ performances with how she shoots the images.
Really, there are only two moments that really fly. One, when Streep does a song on a mountainside with the sea as a background and, essentially, only three angles to cut between. And you get the feeling that this song was why Streep did the film – aside for one last chance to do a movie romp without having to play the smart-mouthed matriarch – and that it was shot exactly as SHE wanted it to be shot. (Attention must be paid!) Second, over credits, when songs are performed on a stage somewhere and the fourth wall is broken… there is real delight in the actors and they seem to be having real fun. But still, it is shot so poorly as to undermine a really great idea.
It’s kind of impossible to do spoilers for this film. If you have seen the ads, you know all the surprises. And that’s okay. Mamma Mia! has enough of a story to work. Really simple… girl’s getting married… girl wants to know who her dad is… she invites three candidates with three distinct personalities… door slamming, singing, and romance ensues.
One very clever idea is that The Girl, Amanda Seyfried, has two BFF girlfriends who mirror The Mother (Streep) and her two BFFs, played by Julie Walters and Christine Baranski. Unfortunately, instead of figuring out how to make this play throughout the movie, the younger duo, who never get to distinguish themselves, are pretty much dumped after the first quarter of the film. So much for that movie theme. Baranski and Walters are natural scene stealers and they pretty much steal the movie when they get a chance, Walters most of all.
But it’s not enough to say, “There is some good stuff so this is a decent movie.” Their performances and some wonderful moments in other performances are a distraction from the filmmaking mess that the movie is.
Amanda Seyfried and Streep get a ton of close-ups, so the make-up decisions by Streep’s personal make-up artist J. Roy Helland are a constant focus. And the way she is made-up and lit chance in scene after scene after scene. She is at her most beautiful when she seems to be trying the least hard to look 20 years younger and windswept.
Cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos was an incredibly bad choice for this film. Not only is he inexperienced in dealing with aging beauties, but his only major American credits are Sony Classic’s Sleuth, shot with a slick, but harsh style, and 2nd unit on Batman Begins, where he clearly did good work, but mostly lighting plastic and metal. So the Streep variations may well be more his fault than Helland’s.
Zambarloukos clearly has a DP crush on Ms Seyfried, who is shot in such warm close-ups that you almost want to spread her face on your toast. The difficult part of that, however, is that as an audience member, you are tracking her bouts of acne on her chin throughout the movie. It’s not severe, but her skin is so luminous so often that when it does turn up, it’s a little shocking. And seeing it… is utterly unnecessary. Her skin is not the responsible party.
Speaking of Seyfried, who broke out as the doofus hottie in Mean Girls and ended up doing a lot of TV, including HBO’s Big Love as a daughter of bigamy, she acquits herself nicely. She is a beauty and she can sing. But she doesn’t pop in a special way beyond her looks and energy. You don’t walk out of the film saying, “Star.” You come out noting that she did a good job. You want to marry her and travel the world, not see her in any movie she does because she is so compelling. She may have that in her… but it would help to have Mike Nichols behind her and not Ms. Lloyd.
There is also an odd sense, at least for me, of Seyfried being a bit objectified by the filmmaking. The whole movie has an air of pleasantly relaxed morality and the costume design by Ann Roth does a really good job of taking it all right to the edge of exploitive or attractive or flattering. But Ms. Seyfried, who has a pretty spectacular shape, seems to be the only person running and bouncing in bikini tops or hanging out with three older men all day in nothing but her skimpy one-piece. As a guy, I was appreciative on some level. But as a film critic, it seemed to be a little out of character for the film. Even when the movie gets loud about sex, its spirit is PG. (The exception is one shot, during a musical sequence, of Christine Baranski dropping out of frame in front of a Speedo-clad 20something boy… a set-up for a joke that would have been less creepy if shot more effectively.)
I think Seyfried has a lot to offer and that she will, eventually, find a real breakout role. We still don’t know quite who she is and that is very much the nature of being a movie star. If any movie proves that, it’s this one. Baranski, Walters, Brosnan, Skaarsgard, and Firth are all playing their images. And Streep is at her best in this film when she finally lets loose with some Streep-isms… that laugh, that look, the sigh. I kept thinking to myself, “Damn it! Someone needs to write a great dramatic role for her soon… she’s been slumming for so long!” But Doubt is also coming this year and that may be one of her best. (Meanwhile, she should have taken Mrs. Lovett in Sweeney Todd, which would have probably taken the movie up in quality by 20% or more and perhaps won her another Oscar.)
As I just wrote, the trio of men are pretty much in their personal wheelhouses… though Brosnan singing is… well… uh… eh… brave.
It’s possible that Mamma Mia! will be a surprise break out in the vein of Sex & The City, but the problem is, I think, that it’s a tweener. Universal is not selling it as the out-and-out musical that it is. (Yes, people just break out into song and people dance in packs.) Ms Seyfried is beautiful and accessible, but the movie really isn’t about her and her girlfriends. And the age of the trio of parental-aged women is not S&TC 40s, but 50something. Who is the movie for? Who is going to show up?
I can tell you from the screening that there was enthusiasm, though one has to keep in mind that we were in a room loaded with people who signed up to come see Mamma Mia!. They were not show virgins. The good news for the studio is that they seemed to mostly be women and not so much gay men. The gay audience that wants to show up will show up. It’s not a very gay-friendly show and, actually, is a bit homophobic. But the gay audience is very discerning and wil either show or not based on materials and the reviews (perhaps the last group on under 50s – those under 50 – that is really critic-interested). But the female audience is the real challenge and teh real box office hope here. The straight male audience is not coming.
I like musicals. And I was ready to embrace the goofy fun of this film. But I could not. I blame that mostly on a failure to reconsider the show in any real way for movies by the producers, Lloyd, and stage writer/screenwriter Catherine Johnson. And even with what was there that charmed, Lloyd just had no idea how to take any moment from a 7 to a 9 or a 4 to a 7 or, most frustratingly, from an 8.5 to a 10.
If you want to do the work for a movie and love ABBA and feel desperate for something light (and probably, are over 40), you might have a good time at the film. I suspect that the box office will look a lot like The Phantom of the Opera, light at home and more forgiving overseas, where the popularity of the show and the music tend to drive more business. Unlike Phantom, the film will be given a pass by many critics, who are generally more forgiving of the flawed lightweight than the flawed heavyweight.
But unlike Rent, this film should have been easy to make work more effectively. (Rent carried the burden of being out of its time by the time it was made as a film, whereas the stage is much more period-friendly. Better choices could have been made, but the material was its own biggest enemy, no matter how thrilling on stage.) It has the light feel of Hairspray, if not the teen exhilaration. It has the “let’s put on a show” of Grease, but not as well supported a supporting cast or as iconic a song selection. It has the potential visual beauty of Evita, but a director who can’t begin to compare to the skill set of Alan Parker.
It’s not going to be anyone’s Waterloo, but it’s no mamma mia of a movie either.

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