Mama Mia! (Universal Pictures)
Make That Grandma Mia!
The stage success of Mama Mia! has been phenomenal. Audiences have cheered it around the globe. The simple story of a young girl trying to find out who her father is, set against a backdrop of one great Abba tune after another, has charmed audiences over and over again. So it was naturally assumed the Hollywood movie version would be just as charming, wrong! Hollywood managed to miscast the film and take it from Mama Mia! to Grandma Mia! in a way only they could do.
Now Meryl Streep is one of the worlds great actresses. She has the awards to prove it. She can go from highly dramatic (Sophies Choice) to moderately funny (The Devil Wears Prada), and she never met an accent she couldnt conquer. But time marches on and Streep is now fifty-nine years old. That isnt ancient but it is too old to play the part of a woman who had triple love affairs in her early twenties and now has a twenty year old daughter.
Donna, the main focus of Mama Mia!, is supposed to be in her early forties. Streep plays her with gusto and enthusiasm but no way is she a woman in her forties. This miscasting throws the movie off.
Then there is Pierce Brosnan. He plays Sam, one of the possible fathers of Donnas daughter Sophie (Amanda Seyfried). Brosnan has charmed us all as James Bond and in other roles. But in none of those other roles has he been forced to sing. When he bursts into song in Mama Mia! dogs began to howl. It is that painful.
But he is not alone in the bad singer department. Colin Firth and Stellan Skarsgard also sound a little tone deaf. In movies like Chicago and Moulin Rouge the enjoyment came from discovering some Hollywood stars actually do have professional sounding voices. That is not the case here. We have actors who can act but not sing so why put them in a musical!
Christine Baranski and Julie Walters star as Donnas two best friends and sometimes backup singers. Baranski looks like a stick, an old Botoxed stick; and Walters well I never could get a handle on who or what she was supposed to be.
The one person who is right for her role is Seyfried. She not only looks like she could be Streeps daughter (or maybe granddaughter), she also sings like an angel. Sophie is the emotional center of the film and Seyfrieds performance is right on target.
The film is rated PG-13 for some sexual innuendoes.
Aside from Seyfried, the glue that holds the movie together are the Abba songs. They are so buoyant and energizing that you find yourself living from one song to the next. Luckily there are a lot of them in the movie and they keep you humming along.
On the down side, the vision of Streep and Brosnan performing in spandex will haunt my dreams for days to come. Mama Mia! That was a sight.
I scored Mama Mia! a golden oldie 5 opt of 10.
