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On Saturday I went to see Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again. My expectations were not that high, which should have meant I walked out of the theater not feeling too much one way or the other about the film, but unfortunately it was good enough that I found myself comparing it to the first one. What I mean by this is that certain choices were extremely good, such as casting, while others were extremely disappointing to a die hard fan of the original. Before Saturday, I did not see myself as that sort of fan—after all, most people do not admit to being huge Mamma Mia! or ABBA fans—but now I might have to reconsider. I care very deeply that the sequel did not connect better to the original.
To start with I should say that I loved ABBA before I heard about the musical or the movie Mamma Mia! It was quite a while before I learned that all the music for this chick flick came from the Swedish pop group, and that ended up being the main reason I watched it. The first full song is Honey, Honey and I love that song, so I was pretty pleased from the beginning. Is it mostly meant to be fluff? Yes. Does it also have a good heart? Also yes. I ended up showing it to my dad, a woodworker, and he loved it. Meanwhile, my mom doesn't like it that much. It is kind of a toss up as to who enjoys it, but their musical taste is usally a good indicator.
Here is a synopsis of the story in Mamma Mia!:
Sophie has spent her whole life on the little Greek island of Kalokairi, supposedly the mythical location of Aphrodite's fountain, where her mother Donna runs a rundown hotel starving for guests called the Villa Donna. She has also spent her whole life wondering who her father is, because Donna has only ever said it was a summer romance. At some point she finds her mother's old diary written during the year she was pregnant and Sophie finds the names of all the men she slept with that summer: Sam Carmichael (the architect), Bill Anderson (the travel writer), and Harry Bright (the banker). Since she is getting married soon (the day following the start of the film), Sophie sends them wedding invitations signed by Donna without telling anyone about it, not even her fiance Sky, because she belives she will know who her father is as soon as she sees him and then she can ask him to walk her down the aisle. In the meantime Donna's old buddies Tanya (the golddigger) and Rosie (the cookbook writer) arrive for the big day, as do Sophie's buddies Ali and Lisa. Unfortunately, when the three gentlemen arrive altogether after Sam and Harry catching a ride on Bill's boat, Sophie realizes she has no idea who is who, and decides to hide them while she thinks about what to do. However, Donna discovers them immediately. She remembers Harry from his punk rock days, Bill from his bohemian surfer dude past, and Sam from the hippie 1970's. They all meet again briefly, which brings mixed emotions for Donna. At first she is a bit lovestruck, then happy to see old friends, then angry that they are here during such a busy time so she tells them to go get on the boat and leave, and then she is distraught. They are a reminder that she had no one to lean on when her daughter Sophie was born and that she was heartbroken over Sam. Tanya and Rosie manage to raise her spirits, and the wedding plans continue. Meanwhile, Sophie chases the three men to the dock and swims out to the boat, where she spends the day with them hearing about their youth when they met Donna. They promise to come to her wedding, so Sophie goes back home to see Sky for a bit then, go to her bachelorette party. Donna and her friends sing for the gaggle of young women there, then the boys crash the party and it turns into one big shindig. Throughout the party, Sophie speaks to each of the three men who might be her father. At first it seems like Bill might be her father, especially since he realizes how old Sophie is. Then Sam seems like a likely candidate, especially since he is the most paternal. And finally Harry thinks he is the father! All three promise separately to walk her down the aisle. Overwhelmed, Sophie collapses. The next day, the wedding plans are underway. Sophie tells Sky about how she invited the three men and they fight about why she wants a big white wedding, why she won't just travel the world with him. This and the stress of not knowing who her father is leads Sophie to asking her mother for help getting ready and asking Donna to walk her down the aisle. On the way to the church, Sam confronts Donna and tries to make amends, but she rebuffs him and states that she is the loser in their situation, something she accepted long ago. At the wedding ceremony, Sophie and Donna end up revealing to each other the fact that they know the three men, and everyone puts the pieces together. Sophie announces that she no longer cares who her father is because she cannot tell, and all three come to stand by her as parental figures. Next she tells Sky that she no longer needs this wedding, so the whole this is canceled. After that, Sam gets down on one knee and proposes to Donna, explaining that he is divorced and has pined for her all his life. Why waste a good wedding? So Donna and Sam get married, the party continues, and Rosie even goes after Bill, a fellow writer. Harry might also have a shot at love, having come out as gay before the church gathering and having danced with a handsome man. As the credits roll, we see the whole cast dressed up in sparkly '70's outfits singing Super Trooper and Waterloo, having a blast.
I think the reason I enjoy this movie is that it doesn't really feel like the actors are acting, but instead playing pretend. The movies gets a lot of criticism for the actors not trying hard enough. Who cares? It did well and they clearly enjoyed it, so it's still a fun flick. It is hard not to have a good time when actors you admire are having fun.
And here is a summary for Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again:
This movie jumps back and forth between Sophie fixing up the hotel to reopen as the Bella Donna and a few decades back when Donna was her age. I will explain them one at a time.
Donna Sheridan has just graduated college as valedictorian with her two pals Tanya and Rosie. Partly due to the fact that her mother did not show up and partly because she is a wild child, Donna takes to the road and heads to Paris. On her first day there she meets Harry, a slightly awkward, slightly punk young British man who decides he is in love with her and asks her to sleep with him. She ends up going along with it, even though he says it will be his first time ever. In the morning she leaves him a note, then leaves for Greece to see the island of Kalokairi, supposedly the mythical edge of the world. She misses the ferry and convinces a handsome young man named Bill with a sailboat to take her there. He agrees, although he clearly has other things on his mind. On the way they save a man whose boat engine has died and who is trying to reach his love before she marries another man. Around this time we see that Harry has also arrived in Greece, chasing after Donna. Bill leaves for the mainland to attend a boat race while Donna stays on the island, where she discovers a rundown farmhouse with a horse trapped in the basement. She runs to get help and encounters a man on a motorcycle. They save the horse together and proceed to spend days and days together. His name is Sam and Donna is head over heels for him the way others have been for her. We see her writing in her journal and hoping all is not too good to be true. She even suggests that he not leave at the end of the week as planned, but stay on the island with her. Unfortunately, she discovers a photo of Sam and a lovely woman, and learns that he is engaged. The end of the week comes and he leaves, not sure he will ever convince Donna that he loves her. At this point Tanya and Rosie arrive for a visit, and she pours her heart out to them. They perform with Donna at the local bar owned by an elderly woman and her son. Then they encourage her to go off with Bill, who has just returned from his race, although Rosie is lovestruck. Not long after, Tanya and Rosie have to go home, and Donna stays to fix up the farmhouse, possibly turning it into a hotel. All the while, she knows that she is pregnant and we see the elderly woman from before help her give birth to Sophie. She is christened in the church.
In the present day, Donna has been dead for a year, possibly due to some sort of accident. Sophie has put her heart and soul into fixing up the hotel and preparing it for a grand opening party that executives and millionaires have been invited to, although Bill, Harry, and Sky cannot make it. She has the help of Sam, Donna's widower, and her hotel manager Fernando (he has a longer name, but I cannot remember it). She has a fight with Sky over the phone since he is studying in New York and has been offered an excellent job, and it seems like he not only will not make it to the opening party, but may not return at all. Soon after, Tanya and Rosie arrive for the grand opening and Sophie discusses with them whether or not she is doing the right thing, if everything is good enough. We also learn that Rosie has broken up with Bill due to seeing him with another woman. Meanwhile we learn that Bill has asked his twin brother to stand in for him at an award ceremony and Harry is leaving a meeting early in Tokyo, both determined to make it to Sophie's big party. Unfortunately a freak storm hits and air traffic stops, the decorations are ruined, and Sophie's dreams are crushed. Everything turns out alright when Bill and Harry get a bunch of mainlanders to come to the party, with the help of the man Bill and Donna once helped out, and Sky makes it there in time. The party is well underway when a helicopter arrives, apparently thanks to Sky, and Sophie's grandmother comes out. She and Fernando lock eyes, and remember falling in love in Mexico, leading to a happy reunion. Sophie runs to the bathroom to throw up in the midst of all this and realizes she must be pregnant, and the word travels fast. Nine months later, everything seems to be going well and Sophie's baby is brought to the church for christening, where Donna's soul watches over them all. As the credits roll, we see the entire cast dancing and singing Super Trooper together in sparkly costumes.
What this film did well at was playing with expectations. When you learn that Donna is dead and that Harry and Bill cannot make it to the hotel's reopening party, you immediately wonder if the actors simply did not want to be involved so they had to be written out of the script. However, they show up a ways into the movie and everyone is relieved. Then, at the very end, Donna appears, if only as a ghostly apparition giving Sophie her blessing. It really feels good to see the actors that were so important to the first movie. And the new actors are really great! All the young counterparts are a lot of fun to watch and really do feel like they could be the younger selves of the Mamma Mia! characters. They also have good voices and comedic timing. Young Donna is especially free of spirit and sexual of body without feeling provocative. And there are some legitimately touching moments regarding Sophie and Donna's connection, even when Donna is gone. I think both Mamma Mia! movies were meant to emphasize the importance of a strong and understanding mother-daughter relationship.
Now what did not work in the sequel? The best way to explain this is to say that the script feels like it was written by someone who was given a relatively detailed outline of the first movie but never actually saw it themselves. There are lots of things that are correct, then there are things that feel left out, and finally there are punchlines to jokes that I certainly hope are in the deleted scenes because otherwise the setup was completely unnecessary. One major example of this missing punchline problem is when Rosie confronts Bill about cheating on her. Earlier in the movie we learned that Bill has a twin brother, so wouldn't it be funny if Rosie learns she broke up with her boyfriend because she thought his brother was him? Instead, he simply says he has changed and she forgives him when he starts crying over Donna's death the way she has been throughout the movie. While the twin brother was funny, it seems like they were trying to set up a joke for farther along. We were even promised a story about a goat that the twin brother never got to tell. As for the problem about the detailed but not thorought outline feeling I get, that mostly has to do with their treatment of the three men Donna spends time with and other little details that are stated during the first movie but ignored during the sequel.
To start with, let's review how Donna got pregnant. The diary reading from Sophie in Mamma Mia! reveals that Donna first met Sam, who she fell madly in love with and who took her to the "little island." Sadly, he was already engaged and had to go home to get married, leaving Donna heartsick. Fun-loving Bill showed up soon after, so she rented a boat to take him out to the "little island." And after that, Harry showed up "out of the blue" and he was so sweet that she once again headed for the "little island." It is a bit unclear what this little island is, but Sophie is under the impression that it is Kalokairi, which seems reasonable, especially if the island is mostly unknown. This means that Donna probably met all three men on the Greek mainland, other than Harry, who states that he met her in Paris and then followed her to Greece, where she essentially had pity sex with him. During the first movie we also learn that Bill had a great aunt on the mainland named Sophia and that Donna helped out an elderly woman named Sophia, who Sophie is named after. When that woman died, she left Donna some money that helped with the hotel. Harry also brings out a guitar that he gave to Donna and has their initials carved into it, standing for Donna Sheridan and Harry Headbanger, going along with his punk rock lifestyle from back in the day.
Now, let's look at Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again. For a while everything lines up. Donna meets Harry in Paris, and he certainly acts like someone who has fallen in love with a woman for the first and only time. There is no trace of a guitar and Harry's look is much more toned down than the first movie implied. Then Donna goes to Greece, where she meets Bill, and this is where it starts to fall apart a little. Apparently Bill is already pretty famous despite his young age as a European playboy and he already has a huge boat to sail. In the diary we learned that Donna had to rent a boat, indicating that Bill did not have one yet. During the reunion scene, Donna also sounds surprised to hear Bill has a boat. ("You have a boat? Good, get on it.") Continuity is ruined between films. Young Bill also says he has an "elderly relative who lives on the island," which is quite a bit different from "great aunt Sophia on the mainland."
Once Donna is on the island and meets Sam, she says that he took her to a little island. But wait, aren't they already on the little island? The movie doesn't even show what she means by little island; it is just an excuse to have Sam and Donna out in a boat taking pictures with Kalokairi in the background. Next, Sam leaves and Tanya and Rosie arrive. They learn about Sam and meet Bill, even though in the first movie their conversation with Donna indicates that they were only aware of Sam the architect, never of Bill or Harry, and are sad Donna never shared her confusion and pain with them. So, they forgot and Rosie forgot about how attracted she was to Bill? It is cute because we know that she eventually ends up with Bill, but it doesn't make any real sense. Then Bill leaves, and Tanya and Rosie leave. At this point I would have expected, Harry to show up, but he is absent for the rest of the film. Donna has already figured out she is pregnant.
At this point I think the elderly woman who owns the bar and farmhouse is supposed to be Bill's relative Sophia. They never interact on screen, but she seems to know quite a bit about Bill and she is the one who provides Donna with a home and helps her through the birth of her daughter, although she is never named. Additionally, on the subject of Bill, in the first movie Donna recognizes him partly based on the Egyptian eye tattoos on his knees. In the sequel, his knees are always covered and I think it would have been funny if they showed his knees or indicated that he became less shy about hiding them. And again, why does he already have a huge boat in his twenties?
I am also disappointed with how Sam and Harry look. Well, mostly about Harry. I understand why they didn't make Young Sam a mustache-wearing, long-haired hippie. I just think it would have been funny if Harry was a bit more punk with his studded collar and eyeliner. They could have at least put in something about his guitar. For a while I was really hopeful because the diary entry stating "Harry showed up out of the blue" (indicating she already knew him maybe) and the fact that Donna met Harry in Paris makes it seem like the whole story will fall into place, but in the end Harry never makes it to Kalokairi, even though Donna supposedly brought both Bill and Harry to the "little island" for some rebound therapy after Sam left.
And finally, I want to touch on the fact that Donna's mother shows up in the sequel. In the original, Donna says that the three dads must have showed up all at once because "someone up there" has it out for her and she bets it is her mother. Tanya and Rosie put in that "she was a piece of work." All this leads me to belive that Donna's mother is dead before the first movie begins. Donna also explains to Sophie that her mother rejected her in large part because she got pregnant out of wedlock. Rosie even mentions "Catholic guilt" when Donna cries about being a slut in her youth. However, in the sequel, Donna's mother arrives via helicopter, clearly a wealthy singer, alive and kicking. If she kicked Donna out for not being Catholic, she is probably being a huge hypocrite because she clearly had something go on with Fernando all those years ago.
Unfortunately I think the writers struggled with getting ABBA songs to line up with a plot. And what is even more unfortunate is that there are a lot of repeat songs (Waterloo, Dancing Queen, Mamma Mia, Super Trooper, I Have a Dream, Name of the Game...) either from the movie itself or the soundtrack. On top of that, the new songs are mostly mellow or melancholy. While beautifully shot, it just does not have the same energy throughout the way the original did. I think it was a mistake to do Dancing Queen again, even if it is ABBA's biggest hit, because the new version just does not have the same upbeat feel. The songs sung by Young Donna and the rest are really good, but the present day songs seem to fall a little flat. Perhaps the Sophie character is not as strong as the Donna character as a leading musical lady?
Final thoughts? Well, at the end of the day, I had a good time and the musical scenes and songs that were good were really good and I enjoyed it a lot. Maybe some juicy deleted scenes will pop up at some point.
(Photo found on Google Images)
