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‘Mamma Mia!’ review preview Part 1

By Michael Barnes | Wednesday, July 16, 2008, 04:00 PM

“Mamma Mia!” is a skinny dip in the fountain of youth.

Just watching flaxen-tressed, 59-year-old Meryl Streep skittering across the turquoise-tinted Maxfield Parish fantasyscape of a Greek island, singing (gloriously) and dancing (enthusiastically) to thumping ABBA songs is enough to give anyone permission, under the right circumstances, to believe the admittedly clunky lyrics: “You can dance, you can jive, having the time of your life.”

Screenwriter Catherine Johnson, who also wrote the story for the stage musical, which is still running on Broadway and will return to Austin in 2009, strains and stretches to attach Benny Andersson, Bjorn Ulvaeus and Stig Anderson’s songs to a meager story about a bride-to-be who invites three possible fathers to her wedding at the Ageaean hotel run by her Earth-mother single parent, a stubbornly independent ex-hippie played by Streep.

While transitions from dialogue to lyrics can be painful, Johnson clearly understands the ancient rites of comedy: Young lovers overcoming obstacles, plotters withholding secrets, old fools acting foolishly, women embracing Dionysian frenzies, chastising their men for shortcomings, balancing sexual power on Aphrodite’s sacred island. She even slips in an updated Greek chorus.

It’s all there. And we play along because we want to believe that all these nice, flawed people can still shake every bit of joy out of life. And because the harmonically ingenious ABBA songs, even when oddly placed, are ineradicable.

Streep doesn’t exactly carry the movie, but she lends it just enough depth and credibility, if not exactly intelligence, applying her usual complicated, misdirected emotional range to motherly instincts, feminist self-sufficiency and, ultimately, romantic rage and redemption. (Her diva turn in “The Winner Takes It All” puts her in the Barbra Streisand, Patti LuPone, Liza Minnelli league, even if the script doesn’t build up the necessary context.)