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A Good Thing To Lose, part 2: Mamma Mia!

As you may have gathered from the previous dispatch, the purpose of these scribblings is to allow myself to experience something I would normally avoid, in the hope of greater understanding and hopefully some broader horizons, and then to share my conclusions with you. You could be forgiven for assuming that the first column was a thinly-veiled ploy to legitimately acquire a self-pleasing sex toy, but I can assure you that's not so – there will be many more of these experiments to come, some of which I'm rather looking forward to. Of course, there's a very real chance that my mind remains sealed off and my reservations are confirmed beyond the slightest sliver of a shadow of a doubt, but "a closed mind is a good thing to lose" as the saying (apparently) goes.

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I should make it clear that my aversion to the movie of the Abba musical Mamma Mia! was nothing at all to do with the soundtrack. I have always had a soft spot for Björn and Benny's supernaturally infectious melodies coupled with Agnetha and Frida's seductive delivery, the results being some of pop music's very finest, back in the good old days when it wasn't considered a bit of a novelty that pop music would be written, performed and produced by the same people. As a young man in the early nineties I became my student friends' regular "sign-in" at Glasgow's weekly Wednesday Night Fever club, and obviously Abba were a dancefloor staple there. I challenge any drunken 19- to 20-year-old man surrounded by glamorous girls not to go immediately wild and disregard all inhibition when the opening piano of Dancing Queen pierces through the speakers. I even went to see the uncanny tribute act Björn Again on a work's night out a few years later and I'm not ashamed to say that I had an incredible evening, as did my fellow shop assistants. So it's difficult to quantify exactly why I had no interest in Mamma Mia!, except to say that I'm clearly not part of the target demographic. It appears to be billed as – and could well be – the ultimate chick-flick, and the advertisers just never got round to my walk of life and hence I assumed it held nothing of appeal to a mid-thirties heterosexual guy. That said, on discussing it with some mid-thirties heterosexual male friends, I discovered that a surprising amount had seen the movie, each claiming to have accompanied a sister, daughter or mother. So maybe it was the fault of my aforementioned closed mind – could it be opened tonight?
Things don't get off to a good start. I've washed down a couple of buttered cream crackers with a few slugs of my Magners but there still hasn't been a big opening number, surely one of the most important elements of a great musical. Instead we get a smidgen of "I Have A Dream" as a fairly pretty girl posts some letters. I'm not particularly impressed. Then hope begins to fade even more rapidly as the purpose of the letters is revealed: 20-year-old lovechild Sophie has discovered the names of her three possible (and very rich and very handsome) fathers in her mother's old diary and has invited them all to her wedding, which will be held in her mother's hotel on a beautiful Greek island. The calm, hopeful attitude that informs the belief that her hitherto unknown biological dad will give her away on her big day doesn't strike me as a convincing representation of the emotional turmoil a young woman in the midst of an identity crisis must surely suffer, not to mention that I think she's far too young to be getting wed. It turns out her mother, Meryl Streep, whose taut and shiny countenance seems to be constantly threatening to tear away from its many seams and slap right into the camera, agrees with me. Yes, she is too young to be married and – I'm sorry, you're probably getting as bored with this as I am. The basic outcome is (SPOILER ALERT) the three dads arrive but no one knows who the father is so they all say they're each happy to have a third of a daughter they've known for barely twenty-four hours and then Meryl Streep marries Pierce Brosnan who she hasn't seen for twenty years until now because Sophie sees sense and calls her wedding off at the alter, and "why let a good wedding go to waste?" as Pierce says. And then everyone else seems to get a shag too.

The problem with Mamma Mia! is that it isn't really a musical at all. There's little concern for convincing characterisation or much of a plot, and what little you can excavate from this shallow feel-good hit is not successfully expressed by amateur singers performing inferior versions of songs that were written thirty years before someone came up with the idea. It's really just a karaoke fairy tale where everyone – once they've stopped shouting for a minute - occasionally breaks into a familiar Abba song (although there were two I didn't recognise) that vaguely suits the mood required. The performances of these songs are naturally varied in quality, but I found Streep's shrill rendition of "Money, Money, Money" particularly irritating, not least because it finds the owner of a massive hotel on an idyllic Greek island moaning about cash struggles – hard to muster sympathy for the woman, isn't it? Colin Firth reveals a quite shocking soprano while Julie Walters raises a smile, but the clear Man of the Match is Pierce Brosnan. God, I love Pierce Brosnan. I'd gladly watch all his scenes every weekend for the rest of the year. He can't sing at all, but he doesn't need to: he's Pierce Fucking Brosnan. I can't explain it, but there's something in the very essence of that man that makes me warm inside, and when he wasn't on screen I spent the time of his absence ardently anticipating his return. Have you seen him in The Matador? I love him in that.

Anyway, I had genuinely wanted and hoped to enjoy Mamma Mia!, but sadly I found it disappointingly average. It does little to involve the audience in its world, taking us for granted and leaving it difficult to care about anyone concerned (with the exception of Pierce, of course). The only genuinely enjoyable sequences are the Abba songs around which it is very loosely based, but each tingle of excitement was met with an equal shiver of awkward discomfort, and in the end I'm just as indifferent to it as I was before. Which doesn't necessarily mean that I wouldn't repeat the experience – it's one of those films that you'd find on the telly at Christmas and leave on in the background while you zoned out and scoffed your honey-roast nuts and sipped a beer. And who knows, it might even grow on me over the course of a few winters. Until then, I shall have to find my Abba Gold CD.

POSTSCRIPT: As I was having breakfast this morning (well, technically afternoon I suppose) before re-reading this piece, I came across Abba's "SOS" on the radio and – without hesitating – cranked up the volume and danced around the kitchen, much to the amusement of my baby boy. Naturally, memories of Mamma Mia! popped into my head, and you know what? I think I might watch it again.

AIDAN MOFFAT