Mamma Mia! (2008)

directed by Phyllida Lloyd

Kyra Kaufer

As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a Swedish pop star.

At the age of eleven, I stood in the basement of my friend’s house and we held our mothers hostage. My mom had arrived to pick me up a half hour prior, but now she sat in an office chair in the center of the room. I had a CD player at my feet, and my friend and I speedran the entirety of Mamma Mia! before them, trying our best to imitate the choreography by rolling on the floor, climbing atop a plastic playhouse, our own Hotel Bella Donna, crumbling where it stands over the site of Aphrodite’s fountain. Mamma Mia! began to consume my life and interests. My CD of the soundtrack never left my player, nor did the bootleg DVD I had illustrated my own cover art for. I had drawings of the characters and costumes in my sketchbook, copying scenes from the paused DVD and the CD booklet while I had no access to the internet.

Old friends and found family flock to Donna’s hotel on the island of Kalokairi to celebrate Sophie and Sky’s wedding. Sophie finds her mother’s old diary, in which she learns of three flings Donna had around the time of her conception, any of whom could be her biological father. She believes that meeting her father will give her some kind of enlightenment on her identity, because him being able to walk her down the aisle would give her closure on her childhood and above all else: a nuclear family. Sophie invites all three of them to her wedding without Donna knowing, and beautiful sparkling melodrama ensues as Donna faces the ghosts of her past, reasons with her regrets, and comes to terms with aging and expressing her sexuality. All the while she is also catching up with her best friends Rosie and Tanya and planning Sophie’s wedding, the largest event she’s held at her hotel thus far.

The emotional stakes could not be higher in Mamma Mia!, yet it doesn’t really matter. The third act of the film begins when Sophie asks Donna to give her away and help her get ready for her wedding. Donna is all the family she needs—she doesn’t have to choose a dad in the end. She is proud and grateful of how her mother has raised her on her own, all the while building their home, a hotel that may not be successful, but it’s Donna’s passion. Donna has lived in fear that her daughter would judge her for the three partners, but there’s surprisingly no shaming in the narrative. Her friends and family constantly console her when she feels ashamed of herself, Sophie even saying at the altar, “I don’t care if you’ve slept with hundreds of men. You’re my mom, and I love you so much.” There’s no use theorizing paternity for Sophie or the audience—she is content with the outcome, having made a special connection with each of the men, who are happy to be a third of Sophie’s father. She’s inspired by them to embrace the free spirit she inherited from her mother and travel the world with the love of her life, not allowing herself to be tied down to the island. She learns that a family does not have to be a mother and a father; a family can be a mother, three fathers, and your two former pop star aunts. Romance is rekindled between Donna and Sam, born between Rosie and Bill.

I feel as though until the release of the sequel in 2018, the majority of the critical conversation around Mamma Mia!, if there was any conversation at all, was that the film was… bad. The singing in Mamma Mia! is not “bad,” though, it’s a creative choice (especially Pierce Brosnan, who was the main target of this criticism… he’s just a dad who accidentally found himself in a musical!). Perhaps it is a naive way to approach film criticism, but the best films to me are the ones where it is apparent that the cast had fun. Meryl Streep gives the performance of her career, as she has moments to jump on a bed and run up a mountain singing in iconic overalls and unkempt hair. Colin Firth portrays father candidate Harry with a charming anxiety (a gay character who is surprisingly not used as a punchline in 2008!). And, of course, is it even a film if Christine Baranski doesn’t kick her leg way up high in the air?

These beautiful people live in a beautiful summer utopia in which they are stuck in an endless session of karaoke with sparkly outfits, blue-ass water and girl power bands. They are not supposed to be “good” at what they’re doing. The choreography is simple and silly, even in the performance of “Super Trouper.” Donna and the Dynamos are in no way washed up pop stars—they’re just getting back into their sequined spandex and having a good time. In the moments when I need to fill the silence, I put on Mamma Mia!. I will admit, I do laugh to myself as Pierce Brosnan tries his best through “SOS,” remembering the creative choice to add in wind whipping sound effects as Dominic Cooper leaps around on boulders, punching the air to impress his fiancée on the beach in “Lay All Your Love on Me.” But there are small moments of tenderness that make me tear up, sometimes scrubbing back through the song to experience them again. The delivery of “honey honey, touch me baby, uh huh” by Amanda Seyfried in “Honey, Honey,” the film’s universe being established as she runs along the cliffs with her best friends, the ocean sparkling beneath them. The line is sung as we cut to Sam and Harry rushing to the Kalokairi ferry. Amanda’s shaky birdlike voice as she sits on Bill’s boat and plays Harry’s guitar: “And now you’re working in a bank, a family man, a football fan, and your name is Harry,” has her trying to comprehend how the men evolved from hopeless romantics into men in suits with careers, with families, or in Bill’s case, a lone wolf. Meryl Streep chuckling through the line “that funny little girl” in “Slipping Through My Fingers” as she watches Sophie prepare to walk down the aisle. After a comedic rendition of “Take a Chance on Me'' by Julie Walters and Stellan Skarsgård in which he is chased around the wedding venue as she tries to seduce him (and succeeds), the wedding party is jumping in unison on the dance floor over a crack in Donna’s patio she has fixated on repairing, chanting “take a chance, take a chance, take a chance.” The music swells and Aphrodite’s fountain bursts through the crack. They dance in it in their fancy clothes, a family free of any jealousy or reproach, shameless about sex and celebrating the love and relationships among them.

There is no reason or explanation as to why a moody eleven year old girl with social anxiety would fixate on the music of ABBA, as there is no reason or explanation as to why the music of ABBA would inspire a narrative of a young woman inviting her mother’s three ex-lovers to her wedding in order to find out who her biological father is. Mamma Mia! gives us pure escapism to a world where the skies are forever blue and minor familial conflict can be worked out with a 70’s pop song. Getting old is not a burden, but is rather hopeful and fun. There’s magic in the ground under our feet with the promise of love and happiness forever.

Kyra Kaufer is a screenwriter and director living on Long Island. She co-hosts the weekly podcast The Zillennial Canon and can be found on Twitter @garlicemoji.