Mamma Mia!

Last weekend, I had the distinct displeasure of watching, 'Mamma Mia!' The exclamation mark in the title about sums it up.

Where to begin on what's wrong with it. Let's start with most obvious, the singing. In Woody Allen's 'Everyone Says I Love You' actors with indifferent singing talent burst into song at a moment's notice. The effect is both charming and humorous. However, the music wasn't really supposed to be about humor in Mamma Mia. The primary appeal of the Broadway version was the pitch perfect rendition of the immensely popular ABBA classics. Yet, inexplicably, Phyllida Lloyd opted for the Woody Allen route in this movie, with disastrous consequences. Instead of ABBA renditions in all their glory (and sugary sweet peppiness), we are treated to painful renditions belted out by actors who struggle with the pitch, tone, and seem to shout the high notes. Its like a bad episode of American Idol, without the schadenfreude as the extreme close-up on the actors faces brings into sharp relief the bulging eyes and facial muscles taut with the obvious strain of their effort.

To make matters worse, Ms. Lloyd attempts to mask her actors' musical inadequacies by drowning out their off key notes with background music, which she often opts to start playing well before the actors start singing, thereby alerting viewers to the oncoming song and making the scene even more unnatural than it otherwise would have been.

This was Phyllida Lloyd's first attempt at directing a movie, and it shows. The lighting is so unnatural that many scenes look as if they were filmed on a Broadway set rather than on location, which would have been fine, if that had been the intention. Moreover, her casting was off. In the movie, Meryl Streep plays a woman with a 20 year old daughter, conceived as a result of a youthful affair. Meryl Streep is a wonderful actress, but she's 59. She would have to have had the affair at 39 for her to have been the mother, an age that would seem to diminish the likelihood of such a fling. She looks more like a grandmother than a mother of a 20 year old.

The plot of Mamma Mia! bears an uncanny resemblance to the 1968 movie "Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell" starring Gina Lollobrigida. In that movie, the three fathers actually do know about and support their daughter, and the mother, Gina Lollobrigida, is very much a vamp. Both the character of the mother and the age are significantly more believable. If you would like to see a more believable and better made version of Mamma Mia!, you might want to try the 1968 version instead. If its the songs that really attract you, you'd be better off with a CD of ABBA's Greatest Hits.