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‘Mamma Mia!’ review preview Part 2
Continued from below….
If Streep’s energy ever lags, in rushes Julie Walters and Christine Baransky, as old friends with their own twists on late-life libido. Accomplished, stylized musical performers, they need no prompting to steal the frame. The possible daddies — Stellan Skarsgard, Pierce Brosnan and Colin Firth — remain modestly in the background for the most part, singing when required. (By now, Brosnan’s undignified howl has been sufficiently ridiculed, so let’s not elaborate. He’s still emits more heat than all the studs who line Baransky’s beach number.)
A few words on the unity of time: Much has been made of a 59-year-old Streep, playing a member of a disco-era all-girl band, giving away a 20-year-old daughter whose boyfriend is Web-savvy, placing the fictional present fairly close to the chronological present. Actually, the math almost works, if you think of the late 1970s as the Age of ABBA, and the late 1990s as the Age of the Internet.
OK, that pushes it. But director Phyllida Lloyd, who knows something about operatic mythos, tries to keep time markers to a minimum, thus allowing us to breaststroke along with the contagious tide.
“Mamma Mia!” and its all-age, full-contact ecstasy — best embodied in “The Dancing Queen” — may do more for women (and men) of a certain age than the comparatively attenuated and over-dramatized “Sex and the City.”
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By Elaine
September 1, 2008 11:13 PM | Link to this
I just saw Mama Mia today, and I must say that the song by Meryl to Pierce before the wedding was breathtaking, Oscar worthy, and deserves any other award available. She is outstanding!! WHEW!!