‘Mamma Mia!’ A silly, fun summer movie

By Robert W. Butler

The very familiar ABBA songs are what make the movie.

As colorful as a peacock feather and just about as insubstantial, “Mamma Mia!” bounces along on the music of ABBA and a cast of pros who sell like there’s no tomorrow.

Yeah, the plot and characters are onion-skin thin, but you can’t help singing along. And in bringing her stage production to the screen, first-time film director Phyllida Lloyd has retained the show’s goofy charm and mostly breathless pacing.

The story unfolds on a Greek island where one-time rocker chick Donna (Meryl Streep) has lived for 20 years, running an edge-of-insolvency hotel and rearing her cute-as-a-button daughter, Sophie (Amanda Seyfried). Now Sophie is getting married and, desperate for answers about her paternity, has pored over Mom’s old diary for clues.

Without telling anyone, the bride-to-be has sent wedding invitations to three men who were Donna’s paramours the summer Sophie was conceived: Sam (Pierce Brosnan), Harry (Colin Firth) and Bill (Stellan Skarsgard). One of them, Sophie is sure, must be her daddy.

And that, folks, is pretty much all the story you’ll get.

Mamma Donna, a sunburned, wild-haired tough cookie who wears a tool belt and overalls, is given a couple of sidekicks who have come for the nuptials. Tanya (Christine Baranski) is a serial trophy wife and veteran man-eater; Rosie (Julie Walters) is a jovially rowdy writer of best-selling cookbooks. The three spend a lot of time laughing, drinking, hugging, lolling around on beds and in general behaving like high school sophomores.

OK , let’s get this out of the way: Streep is 20 years too old for this role. References in the song lyrics to “flower power” don’t help, either. And any attempt to put the characters’ histories into a coherent time frame will result in a splitting headache. My advice: Just roll with it.

The transfer from the artificial world of the stage to a real Greek island (the film was shot on the islands of Skiathos and Skopelos and on the mainland along the Pelion coast) has pluses and minuses. On the plus side, the scenery is drop-dead gorgeous, with impossibly azure seas, pastel villages hugging oceanside cliffs and silver-leafed olive trees swaying in the breeze. Expect a big boost in Greek tourism.

Plus, Haris Zambarloukos’ cinematography practically jumps off the screen with super-saturated colors. The movie is a riot of blue, orange and pink — it’s the closest thing you’ll get to old-fashioned Technicolor.

The downside is that dramatic tropes and clich s that were tolerable in the stylized world of theater seem creaky when plopped down in this utterly believable setting. These are not multifaceted personalities — most can be reduced to a one-sentence description.

It’s clearer than ever that the plot and characters have been created to serve the songs, not the other way around.

But then the songs are what you take away from “Mamma Mia!” Songs like “Honey, Honey,” “Money Money, Money, “ “Dancing Queen,” “The Winner Takes It All” and “SOS” have instant audience recognition — you can’t have listened to radio in the last 30 years without committing them to memory.

Here they tend to burst onto the screen out of nowhere and, at their best, snowball into big production numbers that suck in a Greek chorus of villagers and hotel employees. There’s no real dancing on display — it’s more like rhythmic crowd control — but you’d have to be Scrooge not to enjoy the Bacchanalian goofiness of it all.

The performances are fine. Streep, who in her salad days performed in stage musicals, appears to be having more fun than is legal, bounding around with the energy of a colt and showing comic chops we’ve never seen.