Posted by
AudiR10TDI on Friday, August 01, 2008 11:41:20 AM
TORONTO (August 1, 2008) -- Go and see the new movie "Mama Mia" if (1) you are looking for the best laugh you have had in years and (2) if you ever went to a Star Trek convention dressed as Lt. Uhura even if you had legs like bridge pilings, and your children in subsequent years have begged you never to tell a soul.
I had a tense and unhappy week that ended with a short-lived but intense panic at work about something we thought had been lost, and since I had Points that entitled me to a free movie, I went up to a theatre that holds about 100 in cushy leather tilt-back loungers with table service for snacks. The room was full, largely of middle-aged women but with a healthy minority of men and younger women too. It wasn't long until the whole place was rocking with laughter. The plot, as you probably know, is thin and immaterial: a 20 year old girl who has never known her father finds her mother's old diary (note to self: burn all old diaries) and discovers there are three likely candidates. She invites all three forthwith to her wedding, signing her mother's name. Wackiness results, set to every song ABBA ever recorded. She doesn't discover which one her father is, and she doesn't even get married at the end, but her mother does.
What makes this movie work is hard to explain. In the first place, it had to be ABBA -- no other group is so completely over the top as they were; no outfits as hard to explain to younger generations as those terrifying blue spangled jump suits with elephant bells and the four inch platform shoes, no music as similar and occasionally suffering from what have to be translation glitches as theirs.
In the second place, this movie vindicates Boomer Wimmin who are frankly sick and tired of being shoved aside and requested by both the 17 year old Dancing Queens without hips, breasts, calves, buttocks or life experience (and by Boomer men who lust after said Bratz) to have the grace to go away and die because we are embarrassing them. "Mama Mia!" asserts our right to dress up as anything we want to, be it Lt. Uhura or ABBA girls, and have just as good a time as we had when we were young, whether we are 17 years old anymore or not. Even if we are a square-built older woman who opens bottle caps with her teeth. And it shows that not only do we have the right to do this kind of silly thing, we look darned good in the process.
Of special note to me was the beach production number to "Does Your Mother Know" in which one of the Dynamos (Meryl Streep's old backup group) has a flirtatious rock-out with a beach full of beachboys in which the boys play they think she's a hottie and she plays they are all just babies and everybody has a good time without anybody having to take it seriously. Instead of the sad spectre of "mutton dressed as lamb" Mommies whose fevered desire is to have their childrens' friends find them Hot, we have here a woman acting her age, dressed her age, and whooping it up with friends her childrens' age while keeping the generational barrier in place. (Daughters love it when Mama can whoop it up with their friends; but daughters in the end need mothers, not middle aged hottie competition.)
No, Meryl Streep cannot sing like ABBA, and neither can Piers Brosnan. But they do sing like we'd sing if we viewed life as a song cue. That's what makes us able to enjoy it.
And at the end of the show when the credits are rolling and the 'big kids' come out dressed as ABBA and do their production numbers, not only are we awed that they can do dance moves in those shoes, but for a few minutes we can see ourselves, even if we are no longer seventeen, as ABBA, and not only laugh until we fall out of our chairs, but identify.
The only course I ever failed in my life was social dancing. But I came out of that movie completely in touch with my inner Dancing Queen. Even if I would never dare try to get into that old Star Trek uniform anymore.
Go and see it if you want to laugh, and if you want to be reassured that even if you're not seventeen and you've made plenty of mistakes in your life, it is not too late to find happiness. No matter what your acutely-embarrassed twenty-something kids may say.