Summer Movie Suicide Mission No. 20: Mamma Mia!

In which one man attempts to view every summer blockbuster for the entire season, regardless of taste, genre, or Remington Steele trying to sing.

The so-called “jukebox musical” is a relatively new and pretty lazy form of entertainment. It’s kind of mindless, stuffing an already beloved piece of art into a new medium. And it’s worked, at least on the stage. Plays like Jersey Boys, Movin’ Out, and others are hits, and have fit in pretty naturally into the Broadway landscape, making money, winning Tonys, and packing in huge crowds over long runs.

The idea is making its way to the big screen. And they’re not even all bad. Last year’s Across the Universe and Romance and Cigarettes were both surprisingly pleasant, though flawed, films. There’s something to be said for lazy packaging when the contents are worth the price of admission.

I came to this same conclusion when I saw Mamma Mia!, the ABBA musical, on stage. When the actors performed the songs, the play works as delightful, escapist fare. When the show attempts to advance its plot, it mostly fails. Good thing the plot is so knowingly paper thin that the writers don’t see fit to dwell in it too much.

There are probably a hundred reasons why Mamma Mia! borders on great as a stage play but disappoints so spectacularly on screen, but I’ll only bother with a few of them. There is, of course, the discussion to be had about the suitability of musical talent. In a stage musical, actors are cast with their singing voices as the main showpiece, with their acting ability a secondary concern. In movie musicals (or at least in recent ones), the face and the name are far more important than the voice. In Mamma Mia!, this couldn’t be more evident. Sure, the audience gets to see Pierce Brosnan star as one of Amanda Seyfried’s potential fathers, but they soon get to see Brosnan embarrass himself trying to sing “SOS,” one of the film’s intended showstoppers. Meryl Streep, who plays Seyfried’s overbearing, hotel owning mother, has a nice enough voice (as shown in A Prairie Home Companion), but she can’t really rise to the material here. And thankfully, Stellan Skarsgard (who, with Brosnan and Colin Firth, rounds out the trio of daddies) didn’t have to sing much of anything. Seyfried herself has a beautiful voice, but, despite the fact that she’s really the lead character in the story, her role was minimized in the film version.

Besides casting, there’s another fundamental difference between stage and screen. On stage, the pure spectacle of the musical number is enough to engender a great deal of goodwill in the audience. A theater audience is much more likely to overlook silly plot points, as long as they don’t come at the expense of that spectacle. Audience motivations are different. On screen, a musical performance, even a great one, will never rise to the level of a real live performance, which strikes an audience on a visceral level that film can’t attain. The real thing is so much better than the substitute. Film, obviously, can do things a live performance can’t. It needs to play to those strengths. Without a plot deeper than something a four year old could carve onto a sheet of construction paper, the vocal performance can’t do much.

In an era where the Hollywood sheen can make a phony genre like the musical seem even phonier, a successful movie musical needs to go in one of two directions. Either make a play at realism, or go impossibly big. There are good recent examples on both counts. Once, the Irish musical which one an Academy Award in 2007, went the earthly route, keeping its production minimalist, setting the action in a recognizable, real cityscape, and weaving its music seamlessly into the narrative. Across the Universe, a Beatles themed jukebox musical, went the other way, providing an unabashed fantasy with elaborate production numbers that could never prove functional in any other medium.

Mamma Mia! stays so close to its source material that it doesn’t allow itself any room to operate. Granted, it would be impossible for a story like this one to go for a realist structure, but it certainly could have gone for overblown fantasy. I would have like to have seen this film not take itself seriously at all, but it felt alternately too weighty and too thin.

Ed. Note: I thought about ending this post with some real zinger of an ABBA pun, but decided to cut my losses. You can thank me later.

Film: Mamma Mia!
Director: Phyllida Lloyd
Stars: Meryl Streep, Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth, Stellan Skarsgard, Amanda Seyfried, Christine Baranski

Viewing Situation: Only gentleman in a half full audience; digital projection
Rotten Tomatoes Average: 53%
My Grade (Out of 10): 4

Next Up: The Dark Knight 

>> Jukebox musical [Wikipedia]