‘Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again’ Is a Great Movie
Hear me out.
When I was six, I saw my first string of Broadway shows. I remember liking You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown because I knew the characters, and Seussical because I knew I wanted to play the Cat in the Hat one day. The last show I saw was Mamma Mia!, a show with music I’d never heard of, and a plot that I’m certain, even at my age, sounded batshit. For the uninitiated, Mamma Mia follows Sophie as she invites the three men that she suspects to be her father to her wedding, much to her mother Donna’s surprise. The musical was my first experience with camp in the adult sense of the term: it’s an over the top, supremely emotional show that’s sort of about romantic love, sort of about holding onto your glory days, and yet ultimately not about that much at all. Yet in the moment I was transported by the costumes, the trippy lighting in Sophie’s dream sequence, and sweet father-duplicating Christ, the music. I’d beg to hear that CD in the car every week for the next few years. Mamma Mia! taps into something elemental that even six year olds can understand.
When I was 13, I saw the Mamma Mia film adaptation with my family. As a teen repressing all things remotely unchill, what initially dazzled me now felt stupid. Who gives a shit about this wedding? Why are they jumping into these dumb songs? What does Pierce Brosnan think his voice sounds like? I wasn’t at a time in my life to embrace what Mamma Mia’s heart-on-its-sleeve goofiness — I was too busy thinking about The Dark Knight playing right next door, wondering why I wasn’t seeing it for the third time. I went through a phase where I thought all of the “good” movies were the Nolans, Finchers and Kubricks, and didn’t see the fun in an indulgent ABBA musical. Today I appreciate the film a good deal more, yet I still find stretches of it oddly inert, chained to an obvious storyline that feels more alive on stage than screen.
At 23, my creative aesthetic mirrors the campy, touching, whimsical shit the Mamma Mia! stage musical delivers in spades. In college, I made jukebox musicals with premises worse and weirder than 20 dads showing up at the same wedding. I even had a creative encounter with Mamma Mia! which I’ll just link to and not discuss. However, I still thought the idea of the Mamma Mia! cast reuniting for a sequel was ill-advised. The trailer made the film look purposeless: it felt like they ran out of good ABBA songs, like they made part of it a prequel because there wasn’t a story, and like they were… were they… were they going to kill off Meryl Streep?
Indeed, this is where Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again! makes its first great decision of many: they kill off Donna before the movie even starts.
This isn’t Ned Stark in Game of Thrones; they didn’t kill her to make the world feel cruel. This also wasn’t a situation where the star was uninterested in returning for a sequel — according to writer/director Ol Parker, who pitched the idea to Streep, the movie wouldn’t have happened if she didn’t like the idea. The film never even provides exposition for how or why she dies; as far as the story is concerned, she was a light, and now she is out. Mamma Mia 2 is set around Donna’s memory and legacy: this death brings the ensemble back together and provides the emotional spine for each story. Both timelines in the film– one following Sophie reopening Donna’s hotel, the other following a young Donna meeting Sam, Bill and Harry– investigate what made the original Donna the magnetic force that convinced everyone on the island of Kalokairi to believe in love.
The shadow of this tragedy shapes Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again from just a good time into an emotional experience. Parker‘s sequel feels reminiscent of a Bollywood musical, swiftly bouncing between visually sumptuous dance numbers, melodrama, new romance, rekindled romance, slam-dunk one-liners and unfiltered tearjerker sequences. They all work. It’s the kind of film that waits to give Andy Garcia’s character a first name until he locks eyes with Cher. Their eyes well up, she calls out “Fernando?” and the opening pan pipes of “Fernando” start to play. It emphatically commits to the bit, wringing silliness out of pathos and pathos out of silliness. It’s one of the year’s best movies.
Here We Go Again moves at the pace of a fever dream. The constant transitions between present day and 1979 (the film spends about an equal amount of time in each timeline) are never anticipated, but come about in fluid and emotional ways. Parker pushes into a mirror, match-cuts on action between mother and daughter, or — in my favorite transition — shows Pierce Brosnan looking off wistfully, saying “I let her go,” and pans along his eye-line into the past. These might seem like small choices, but indicate the film knows that to create a surrealist musical world, it has to keep its beach ball up in the air at all times.
Save for The Godfather Part II, few films would bother blending timelines this casually: Donna’s 1979 story not only feels integrated with the present day story but bolsters its emotional resonance. Much of this has to do with Lily James giving career-best work as a young Donna. She wisely doesn’t do an impression of a young Meryl Streep, yet she moves across Europe with the same effervescence and the casual radiance. Young Bill (Josh Dylan) says to her “You have one of those smiles that makes the rest of the world smile too” — it sounds schmaltzy, but is surprisingly true. James’ performance balances Amanda Seyfried’s melancholic return as Sophie, a girl investigating her mother’s legacy and whether she is following in her footsteps. Through James, we feel what was so special about her mom.
Parker’s control of rhythm helps sell the film’s daring tonal shifts by making them feel of a piece with one another. Here We Go Again has a surprising number of scenes where characters like Tanya (Christine Baranski) and Rosie (Julie Walters) openly weep over returning to Kalokairi without Donna. There’s something surreal about watching Pierce Brosnan sing “SOS” to a picture of his dead love — no irony, no comic relief, just sadness. In that moment I wondered how a Mamma Mia! movie was getting away with so much ennui. Only when watching “Dancing Queen” later on did I realize this ennui gives the characters a reason to try and celebrate the lives they have. “Dancing Queen” is the biggest, longest and silliest number of the whole bunch, featuring the best moment of the movie where Colin Firth holds Stellan Skarsgard at the head of the boat in a Jack-Rose pose. The set-piece comes at a moment where the Hotel Bella Donna reopening has collapsed and Sophie feels like she failed her mother. There’s something spiritual about the number: it’s as if these boats are visiting Sophie from beyond the grave. Her three dads and fiancé sail into shore and bring her that her mother would want for her.
The musical numbers in Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again are some of the best I’ve seen at the movies in the past few years. They’re colorful, fast-paced, and bursting with joy. Young Harry (Hugh Skinner, the most charming of the young dads) makes Donna fall for him with “Waterloo,” a lavishly designed piece that takes place in a French restaurant. The waiting staff wears full Napoleon-era period garb as they dance behind Harry and Donna, who sword-fight with baguettes. The number’s most pleasing element is how goofy the choreography is — Harry matches faces made by various statues, and the second half consistently features chicken-esque head bobbing. This is all ridiculous, but like the rest of the film “Waterloo” earns this tone with its impeccable craft. The rhythm is fast, the movement is impressive, and the camera never stops dancing.
Even if “Waterloo” is the best number in the film, Mamma Mia 2 doesn’t have a bad set-piece. “When I Kissed the Teacher” introduces us to how Young Donna brings her peers into her musical reality, as she takes over her graduation ceremony and wins her teachers over towards song and dance. Then there’s “Fernando.” This movie knows you know Cher is coming, and has a lot of fun building up her entrance, including a 360-degree shot wrapping around a helicopter headed to the island as action-movie music plays. When Cher starts singing, the movie jumps so far out of reality that fireworks shoot into the sky as she reunites with her lost love.
The film’s most inspired sequence is Streep’s return, which comes in a sequence that intercuts Sophie baptizing her own daughter with Donna baptizing Sophie in the same chapel. We pan down to the holy water and James becomes Streep: to “My Love, My Life,” we watch Donna watch Sophie grow up and celebrate her daughter’s life with their family. Endings like these are pretty common in theater musicals like Into the Woods or Kinky Boots or a million others where characters who died come back to celebrate whatever the main character achieved and sing the final song of the show with the full chorus. They are rarely attempted in film musicals. This number bends reality to produce a pure, emotional fantasy. We see Donna, secure about the future her daughter is entering, and Sophie, secure she is living her life the way her mother would have wished.
It’s unique to write about many of the transcendent elements of this film, and then remember that I set out to write a defense of it. Here We Go Again has been generally well-received, but if you scan Rotten Tomatoes you’ll find many qualifiers to its praise: “Fun for what it is,” “Made for the fans,” “Terrible and irresistible,” etc. I’ve found a similar expectation with many of my film-savvy friends: a movie like this cannot be great. Maybe they don’t like romantic comedies, Hollywood sequels, musicals, ABBA, or camp. At 13, I would have agreed with them. At 23, I think Mamma Mia’s campiness and self-awareness lift its craft and emotional through-line to help produce a thoroughly joyous experience.
Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again is the best kind of sequel, one that narratively and cinematically takes risks the original wouldn’t have tried. It uses the inherent positivity and campiness of ABBA’s music as a call away from grief and towards the celebration of life. I wholeheartedly recommend taking a chance on this movie. It made me feel six again.
