Greece, the Musical!

Rating: 10/10 (21 November 2010)

Agreed that Mamma Mia is a fantastically crafted musical, with amazing energy, top class music, mesmerising song and dance numbers and great central performances. But can all that distract us from a horrendously immoral story at the core? What is going on here? It clearly glamorises promiscuity and the rejection of family values, and to an extent that has never been seen beyond the bounds of pornography. Why is the music of ABBA framing this sordid tale? Couldn't they have a normal story and still make it fun? I'm afraid not, and I'll spell out the reasons below.
ABBA is cheese to begin with. "Nothing more to say / No more ace to play"?!! They were a Swedish group with little English trying to break the Anglo-Saxon market, and the result was pure cheese. But with four people bursting with musical talent, the cheese became irresistible too. This music was different from everything else on the market. Where music in general was losing its grammar, busy rocking and rolling, going through punk, hip hop, grunge, etc etc, ABBA stuck to the basics of structure. Each ABBA song is a masterpiece of composition, worthy to be studied next to Bach and Beethoven in my opinion. And such meticulous grammar does not work without cheese. I can't imagine Winner Takes It All being sung with feisty lyrics. "Nothing more to say / Go ahead, make my day"? It just doesn't work. Cheese was an integral part of ABBA songs. We just got used to it.
ABBA music was in need of a serious shake-up. It sounds good, but it's also stiflingly strait-jacketed. For thirty years we've been listening to perfect compositions, and don't we just wish that it would let its hair down! This is where the filmmakers of Mamma Mia come in. I believe that they are responding to this aching popular need. The songs are sung in a more spontaneous manner, and put into a story where the energy flows. But how to offset the cheese? This, I realise, was a major problem for the makers. If the songs are cheesy to begin with, how cheesy is it to put them in a musical where they appear to be part of the story? The story had to be as feisty as possible. It needed to plumb the depths of liberal and permissive society. Otherwise it would be laughed off the planet. And that's what the story of Mamma Mia does too. We have the mother not knowing who the father of her daughter is, and yet all three candidates turn up at the wedding of the daughter. After all the guilt and angst has served its plot purposes, we have both mother and daughter being cool about the mother's immoral past, and in fact celebrating it. The daughter cancels her wedding, and presumably embraces the immoral lifestyle of her mother. So the whole father thing was just a ruse to have a story with a lot of song and dance. It appears that normally these people have banished fatherhood from the earth, and then only bring up the prehistoric concept when they want to make a musical. I think that is as subversive as you can possibly get.
And it works too. The energy of the film is unbelievable. And it was exactly this energy that was needed for the thing to click. Would the people involved have been as enthusiastic if they had been working with tread-of-the-mill Cinderella story? I don't think so. The hot cake story at the center is the energising force. In the end we are just about distracted from the luridness of the story. We are immersed into the fun of it all, and in cinematic terms that spells success. The music too sounds far better than their ABBA versions.
But we are going to be sorry in the end. Sorry that we took part in this celebration of promiscuous matriarchy. There is no doubt about it. This film is plumbing the depths of decadence. Greece is where Western civilisation began. By the evidence of this film, it is also where it ends.