Tapping your toe won't make this musical adaptation get much better

Rating: 4/10 (30 July 2009)

"Mamma Mia!" is one of those movies that looks like it was more fun for the cast than it was for the audience. The actors look like they're having a blast dancing on the shores and piers of various Greek islands, while in the meantime we sit in a theater trying to hum our way through another poor conversion of a stage musical to the silver screen.
The musical, based on music by Swedish pop group ABBA, was written for the stage by Catherine Johnson, who also writes the screenplay. Bringing her vision to life is fellow Brit theatre director Phyllida Lloyd. Between them, the two haven't a lick of real movie-making experience and it shows. Stage minds should never be put in charge of a movie, something proved many a time, most recently Susan Stroman's "The Producers" movie, the Mel Brooks musical she directed on stage. The thinking of theatre minds does not grasp the scope of film and so "Mamma Mia!" looks more like a scrapbook of music montages, cheesy dances and bad MTV videos.
The hit Broadway show takes some narrative suggestions in the lyrics of several ABBA songs and dreams up a way to thread them together, really quite genius. A young girl named Sophie (Amanda Seyfried, most notably the ditzy Karen from "Mean Girls") is getting married on a Greek island where her former pop singer mother (Streep) runs a hotel. Unsure of who her father is but curious, she invites the only three possible candidates in hopes she'll find out which one it is. The men are older English hunks Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth and not-so- much-hunk Stellan Skarsgard
The musical is diluted on the screen by a feeling that all the songs need to be included, that the show can naturally translate when in fact it's more of a showy feel-good musical and not a very visual story. Numbers are forced and the camera feels lost because it doesn't know what to focus on. When it runs out of ideas, terrible things happen like an image of Meryl Streep's face in a roulette wheel singing about money. Johnson and Lloyd between them have no creative answers and settle with stage direction.
Even as talented as Streep is, some of the things she's asked to do in this movie have me convinced she just took the money and said "I'll at least have fun with this." Her talents help most in the drama between mother and daughter and perhaps she rubs off on Seyfried who is really quite nice too. Both have the best singing voices in the movie too, though Streep does have to stylize her singing a bit more to make up for her vocal shortcomings. On the opposite of that spectrum is Brosnan, who must've worked tirelessly with a vocal coach to no avail. Clearly star power was valued more than musical talent in much of the casting.
Most of the cast has great chemistry, but I would too if I were out there wining and dining in Greece with all these notable actors when the camera wasn't rolling. Fun is easy to capture on camera -- a stage musical is not. Truthfully, it's worth the higher admission price to see the show again or even just listen to its soundtrack than waste time with this movie version. It's all about the music anyway.