Hollywire's Film Critic Suffers Terribly Through Intolerably Sappy Musical  'Mamma Mia' Review

Rating: 3/10 (1 March 2009)

It was a very unique and specific kind of torture for me to sit through Mamma Mia, one of the most unendurable pieces of cinematic confection that I can remember ever having experienced ever since I was about ten years old and my mother used to punish my brother and I by making us watch Peggy Sue Got Married. I haven't seen that movie in nearly 20 years and there's a good chance I might enjoy it today, but as a kid it became synonymous with the worst movie ever made.
Mamma Mia is not the worst movie ever made. It's not even a bad movie, it's actually pretty good, for what it is. But in order to enjoy it you have to be a fan of the musical and by God, you had better be an ABBA fan.
Myself, I can't stand ABBA and I am notorious for hating musicals. There is nothing more distracting than an emotional love scene that is suddenly disrupted as the characters break into song. YAWN.
There are a lot of people that will love Mamma Mia, and it is a well-presented adaptation of the successful Broadway play. The locations are stunningly beautiful, the story is well-told and the performances, despite an over-abundance of cartoonish over-acting (mostly on the part of Amanda Seyfried as the afflicted Sophie), are wonderful in their own way.
Unfortunately, I happen to agree unequivocally on the subject of musicals with the late Pauline Kael, who wondered about even The Sound of Music, one of the most enduring of musical classics (and the Best Picture of 1965) if there wasn't at least one Von Trapp child who didn't feel like bursting into song and singing his head off along with everyone else. My thoughts exactly about Mamma Mia, and any other musical in which the characters break into song at no other provocation than the gradual rise of the orchestra. It just makes no sense to me.
According to Kael, musicals are about "a freshness that is so mechanically engineered and so shrewdly calculated that the background music rises, the already soft focus blurs and melts, and, upon the instant, you can hear all those noses blowing in the theater."
"Whom could this operetta offend," Kael asks? "Only those of us who, despite the fact that we may respond, loathe being manipulated in this way and are aware of how cheap and ready- made are the responses we are made to feel. We may become even more aware of the way we have been turned into emotional and aesthetic imbeciles when we hear ourselves humming the sickly, goody-goody songs."
Amen to that!
The story of Mamma Mia, despite being shrouded in ridiculous sing-a-longs, is about a young lady who has never known her father. She discovers her mother's diary that names three possible, ah, suitors, and she secretly invites them to her wedding in Grece, believing that she will instantly know her real father on sight and can finally bring him into her life.
Meryl Streep plays the part of the mother, now living a comfortable single life in an astonishingly beautiful little Greek villa overlooking the Aegean Sea, who has long since moved on from what can only be described as her flagrantly promiscuous youth. Through a series of misunderstandings, the three men who arrive at the wedding all simultaneously come to believe that they are Sophie's father, and each confides in Sophie, before she has a chance to argue, mind you, that it will remain their little secret until they can make the big announcement at the wedding ceremony.
If you're wondering how she could manage to get three different men to think that they are her father and those three different men to engage in such one-way conversations with her that they could make exactly the same plans before she could argue with them, then you are wondering about one of the great many preposterous absurdities of the movie's plot.
I will admit that I feel like a stick in the mud criticizing what is obviously a popular movie, but it seems pretty accurate to say that you can assume your opinion of the movie will hinge entirely on your opinion of ABBA's sing-writing repertoire, which I find insufferably cheesy and cloying. And the convenience of the ending, in which all loose ends miraculously fit together like jigsaw puzzle pieces, doesn't help.
Note: I understand that this review is a bit of a rant, but please understand that this is a movie with a very specific audience in mind, and there won't be many fans of it outside that audience. I'm outside it. Also, I watched the movie with one of my gay friends, and he gleefully sang every song word-for-word in my ear throughout the entire movie. This also did not enhance the experience