Mamma Mia!

Review

Who’d-a thunk when Meryl Streep won her Oscar for Sophie’s Choice that 25 years later, she’d be capering fatuously to Abba songs while, next door at the multiplex, Batman would be reenacting Götterdämmerung? High culture, low culture, the center isn’t holding. Anyway, a golden-aureoled Streep does more fake laughing in the first half-hour of Mamma Mia! than in her entire career; she must have taken hits of nitrous oxide between takes. She plays the mother of a 20-year-old (Amanda Seyfried) who’s about to get married (they live on a sun-drenched Greek island) and wants to know which of the three men who made the beast with two backs with Mom is her dad—so she invites the trio (Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth, Stellan Skarsgard) to the wedding. None of the synthetic Abba hits have to do with this setup: They’re generic, shoehorned in, and when the characters begin to sing they don’t reveal more of themselves—they become more simpleminded. It wouldn’t matter if there were good dancing, but it’s all skipping-along-cliff-paths-waving-arms stuff, a few frames at a time. Seyfried (of Big Love and Mean Girls) is a radiant object and can sing, but I’d like to forget the others—especially Brosnan, whose singing is the best imitation I’ve heard of a water buffalo. Streep has a sweet voice and knows how to use it (although she can’t save a song as terrible as “The Winner Takes It All”), but it’s sad to watch a perfectionist remove part of her brain and try to convince us she’s having a jolly time. — David Edelstein

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New York Magazine Reviews

• David Edelstein's Full Review (7/21/08)