Word: abba
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...older ones, anyway. For them, this is prime nostalgia. For those too young to remember the Abba years, it's just faux-stalgia. But even that has its allure. It can turn a hapless movie into a fun one. And if you don't like the Mamma Mia! film, you can still hum those tunes all the way home...
...Bill (Stellan Skarsgard, 57) and Harry (Colin Firth, the baby at 47). They arrive the day before the wedding, and intrigue ensues. Who's the real father? Will Donna be able to cope with three thorny reminders of her wild youth? And how will the movie shoehorn such Abba hits as Waterloo and Money, Money, Money into this far-fetched farrago...
...last question is the easiest to answer. Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus, the boy half of Abba, may have been writing for the Top 40, but their songs explored a gamut of dramatic situations, from the vagaries of celebrity (Super Trouper, Does Your Mother Know) to the wistfulness a woman feels as her daughter grows up (Slipping Through My Fingers). And since Abba's vocalists were women (Anni-Frid Lyngstad and Agnetha Faltskog), the guys composed enough hits over the group's nine-year run to accommodate all the female characters in Mamma...
...this once, then run for cover: Abba was not just the top-selling group of the '70s; Andersson and Ulvaeus created the smartest, most buoyant body of work from any pop group since the Beatles. Their gaudy gear, with the spangles and spandex, made them easy to deride, but their real sin was that they lacked "depth," which is to say they didn't pretend to be miserable. Instead, like pop performers from an earlier age, they pretended to be happy. Their music did too. The lyrics to the song Mamma Mia confess to erotic obsession and serial masochism...
Eventually, as Donna and her gal pals don trashy frocks to do Abba's greatest hits and a Greek chorus of villagers materializes as a backup group for practically every number, Mamma Mia!'s flouting of narrative and visual logic starts to suggest a cunning subversion. The film is not failed kitsch but triumphant Dada. It exists in an alternative universe, an Abbaworld, where 40 years telescopes to 20, the Seine is the Aegean, and Streep's outsize cheerfulness is the expression of a soul in mortal panic...