Word: mias
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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 Mia...
...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, but the perky melody puts the pain at an ironic distance. It was heartache you could disco to. That's why millions of people, not all of them idiots, felt better listening to Abba's music. Hearing it now, people still...
That's the mood the Mamma Mia! movie tries to tap, but with a sledgehammer. The cast, especially the older women, is given to giggles and girlish body language. You're meant to think everyone making the film had a great time, so you should too. At one point, Streep shouts, "Let's go have fun!" But the bonhomie is oppressive; the high spirits are not impromptu but imposed: Listen, people, you vill haff...
...film in a strenuous simulacrum of pleasure. She has the laughs the way a consumptive has the coughs. You worry that when Streep dies and goes to Actor Heaven, the recording angel will say, "On this scale we have decades of transcendent performances, and on this scale, that Mamma Mia! thing. Begone...
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...