Mam­ma Mia! Here We Go Again

Can you hear the drums, ABBA fan? I remem­ber long ago anoth­er star­ry film like this. In the glit­ter lights, ABBA fan, you were hum­ming to your­self or going to sin­ga­long screen­ings. And I’m not ashamed to say the thought of a pre­quel-sequel almost made me cry.

Ten years have passed since the mag­i­cal Swedish dis­co pop of Agnetha, Ben­ny, Björn and Anni-Frid was first brought to our screens (via Greece) in Mam­ma Mia!. The film grossed $600 mil­lion at the inter­na­tion­al box office by turn­ing dad­dy issues and tricky fam­i­ly his­to­ry into a sum­mer par­ty. After much singing and danc­ing, bride-to-be Sophie (Aman­da Seyfried) found her­self with three com­mit­ted fathers, Bill (Stel­lan Skars­gård), Sam (Pierce Bros­nan) and Har­ry (Col­in Firth). Her moth­er, Don­na (Meryl Streep), was also able to final­ly spell out the name of the game and rec­on­cile her­self with all these past lovers, even mar­ry­ing Sam.

Although see­ing these tal­ent­ed – and many of them old­er – actors burst into ser­e­nades and duets was the main plea­sure of Mam­ma Mia!, the way it toyed with our expec­ta­tions is what real­ly made the film sing. Instead of con­demn­ing her moth­er for not let­ting her have a prop­er father, Sophie accept­ed that Don­na lived a wild youth and sees her danc­ing queen her­itage as a bless­ing, nev­er going down the DNA-test route to find out which man she should call pap­pa. The idea of a sequel dou­bling as a flash­back of the events that led to Donna’s preg­nan­cy, then, made me won­der if any­one could hear me, SOS: where we about to kill the mys­tery and reveal that Sophie’s moth­er knew all along?

Yet I couldn’t escape Mam­ma Mia! Here We Go Again if I want­ed to. Donna’s back­sto­ry (with Lily James in the younger role) proves fer­tile ground for all the emo­tions that ABBA songs con­vey so pow­er­ful­ly: her joy of fin­ish­ing school and kiss­ing the teacher good­bye; the excite­ment of flir­ta­tion when meet­ing those three nice young men; the hope­ful long­ing for the future when she arrives in Greece and feels imme­di­ate­ly at home. Of course, heart­break finds its place too.

To her cred­it, James doesn’t attempt to mim­ic Meryl, instead aban­don­ing her­self to the require­ments of the role, which is essen­tial­ly an entire­ly new one. Through the years, Don­na has changed, and the con­trast between her youth­ful gimme-gimme-gimme atti­tude and her more rea­son­able, when-all-is-said-and-done adult self gives the film an unex­pect­ed­ly broad nar­ra­tive scope. In fact, the par­al­lels are stronger between young Don­na and Sophie, as the lat­ter is about to ful­fil her mother’s dream of turn­ing her island vil­la into a hotel. Strug­gling to rec­on­cile her inde­pen­dence with her mar­riage, Sophie doesn’t imme­di­ate­ly realise how much she resem­bles her mamma.

This film is to Mam­ma Mia what The God­fa­ther: Part II is to The God­fa­ther. The dif­fer­ence here is that, as Sophie finds her­self more or less know­ing­ly fol­low­ing in the foot­steps of her moth­er, both women go through life using song and dance rather than mon­ey and favours. To para­phrase film crit­ic Pauline Kael on Coppola’s masterpiece(s), ​“the dar­ing of Part II is that it deep­ens the scope and enlarges the mean­ing of the first film”. And so it proves here, with songs from the first film reap­pear­ing as call­backs yet gain­ing more rel­e­vance as time has passed.

Bros­nan mur­mur­ing a few lyrics from ​‘SOS’ as Sam rem­i­nisces about Don­na is heart­break­ing, and it also helps us to for­give the actor for his ter­ri­ble ren­di­tion of the song 10 years ago. Part­ly due to the younger actors join­ing the ensem­ble, but also thanks to much reflec­tion on the film­mak­ers’ part, the cast is no longer forced to exag­ger­ate their mod­er­ate singing and danc­ing abil­i­ty. Although James car­ries the film with her clear tal­ent, the oth­er per­form­ers com­mit more to the mean­ing behind the words than to the melody – all except Cher, of course, who sud­den­ly appears as Donna’s estranged mother.

The bril­liant­ly chore­o­graphed musi­cal num­bers tend to focus on the more agile young cast, cre­at­ing some tru­ly awe-inspir­ing moments. As such, they build up to the old­er actors’ more sta­t­ic but nonethe­less poignant and tri­umphant per­for­mances. And at long last, Andy Gar­cia is final­ly giv­en the oppor­tu­ni­ty to show what he can do in a supe­ri­or sequel. Mam­ma Mia has done it all before and now it’s back to get some more. It’s an offer you can’t refuse.