The Greatest Trick

Since Mamma Mia! has become such a massive box office success, I decided I really ought to give it a watch. My expectations were not high, but I enjoy musicals. Singin’ in the Rain, West Side Story and Top Hat are among my all time favourites and on a more contemporary note, I thoroughly enjoyed last years Hairspray. Also, as a fan of pop music in general, I am partial to Abba and was curious to see exactly what has made this film such a hit.

I do not wish to be accused of gender prejudice, so I am going to preface this review by saying many of my favourite films are movies that could be termed “women’s pictures” to use old Hollywood vernacular. Classics like All that Heaven Allows, Peyton Place, Mildred Pierce, and of course Gone with the Wind would be among these, along with occasional more contemporary pictures such as Four Weddings and a Funeral and Bridget Jones Diary (essentially Jane Austen with lower moral standards). Admittedly contemporary favourites aimed primarily at a female audience are few and far between as generally speaking Hollywood (and Britain) seems to have given up on such films for complex reasons I shan’t go into in this review.

Anyway, to the matter at hand. Mammia Mia! is absolutely ghastly. In case that wasn’t clear enough allow me to reiterate: it is toe-curlingly, mind-bogglingly, headache-inducingly bad. It is an unwieldy mess of gargantuan proportions that didn’t even make me laugh once. At several points, I told myself it couldn’t get any worse, only for the film to reach hideous new lows. By the end of this criminal waste of celluloid, I was ready to gouge out my eyeballs. Time to name and shame those responsible: step forward director Phyllida Lloyd and writer Catherine Johnson.

The plot concerns Sophie (Amanda Seyfried), a girl living on a Greek island who on the eve of her wedding wants to find out who her father is. After reading her mother’s secret diary she discovers it could be one of three men, so she invites them all to the wedding, unknown to her mother. That is merely the hook the entire cast use as an excuse to make complete idiots of themselves. But whilst I’m all in favour of pratfalls and slapstick in silly comedy musicals, this time it simply isn’t funny. The cast use their own singing voices, but this hasn’t the charm or novelty of – for example – Woody Allen’s Everyone says I love you. In between badly choreographed and flatly directed songs, the screenplay is like an episode of a really, really bad Australian soap opera with characters to match, especially the monumentally annoying Sophie and her even more annoying boyfriend Sky (Dominic Cooper), who I found myself wanting to stab to death with a toothpick.

Performances are all over the top, but not in a good way, and only Pierce Brosnan, who should be thoroughly ashamed of himself for starring in such rubbish, emerges with an iota of credibility. The rest of the cast – Meryl Streep, Colin Firth, Julie Walters, Stellan Skarsgard et al – all look like they are having fun, but crucially it is they who are having the fun, not the audience. There is not a shred of interesting character development or depth, and the plot is painfully predictable. No, I don’t care if that’s missing the point. Call me old fashioned, but I like these things, even in such lightweight alleged entertainment. Hairspray was light as a feather, but had characters with a modicum of complexity and even tackled a serious issue (institutional racism). Defenders of Mamma Mia! will counter that it’s supposed to be escapism and that its not what happens but how it happens that’s important. Well, I’m all for escapism, but the world of Mamma Mia! is not somewhere I would like to escape into, but somewhere I would want to escape from before my brain melted. Besides, regardless of whether it’s what happens or how it happens that’s important, in either case, the film is awful.

Since this is a movie aimed primarily at a female audience, I can only urge those women who have not seen it not to subject themselves to this rubbish, and demand that films aimed at them are actually good. However, at this stage, such statements are like shutting stable doors after the horse has bolted. Mamma Mia! has made more money at the international box office than The Dark Knight.

From a Christian perspective, this film represents the latest in a drip drip trend of moral relativism. The message seems to be that it doesn’t matter who Sophie’s father is, as long as her mother had a good time when she was young sleeping with lots of men. Well, that’s all right then. Of course, Christian morality is nowhere to be seen, having been soundly rejected by all concerned. Instead they seem to have swapped it for a kind of Greek neo-Paganism (there’s a silly subplot involving Aphrodite’s fountain). And of course, the obligatory token gay couple are present and politically correct in predictably annoying fashion.

If all this makes me sound like a prudish party pooper, good. The only – and I mean only – thing that prevents me from declaring Mamma Mia! to be the Antichrist, is the fact that I like the songs. This is particularly depressing as I could have stayed at home and listened to an Abba CD in the first place. During particularly excruciating moments in this film, I silently thanked the Lord that I was not watching a Celine Dion musical. Such a horror would not merely be a sign of the impending apocalypse, like this film, but THE apocalypse.

Simon Dillon, October 2008.