If you fused the virtues of the original “Mamma Mia!” and its new sequel, “Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again,” the result would be one good movie. The methodical plotting and programmatic sentiment of the earlier film are balanced by the vigor and charm of its cinematic choreography. “Mamma Mia!” is a musical starring a cast of actors who aren’t primarily singers and dancers, and the movie’s director, Phyllida Lloyd, films their singing and dancing with a lively warmth to match their playful and hearty efforts. The sequences give the impression that she really wants to see what the musical action is like when she films it a certain way, and, at moments (notably, in the finale, centered on Julie Walters), the kinesthetic surprises strike emotions that the comedic action only strains at.
“Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again” stands the earlier movie on its head (while using only a few of the songs that were prominently featured in it). Dramatically, it is far more elaborate than the original. Donna Sheridan (Meryl Streep), the American woman who stayed on the (fictitious) Greek island of Kalokairi, built a small hotel, and raised her daughter, Sophie (Amanda Seyfried), there, has died. A year after her mother’s death, Sophie, who’s about twenty-five, has finished renovating the hotel and is preparing—with the help of Sam (Pierce Brosnan), one of her possible fathers, and the one who married Donna at the end of the earlier film—its grand reopening. She’s hoping for her other two fathers, Bill (Stellan Skarsgård) and Harry (Colin Firth), to show up, awaiting Donna’s friends and musical cohorts, Rosie (Julie Walters) and Tanya (Christine Baranski), and fighting with her husband, Sky (Dominic Cooper), over the next turn in their lives.
Though the main characters of the original all return and their roles are certainly not deepened, “Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again” is nonetheless a movie of its script, written by Ol Parker (who also directed), Richard Curtis, and Catherine Johnson. Its drama is, in effect, built on mourning, which, far from being merely expressed or enacted, is embodied in an intricate flashback structure that serves a peculiar function. It brings the past to life, not for the movie’s characters or for its dramatic necessities and connections but, rather, directly for viewers. In “Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again,” the recovery of the past outleaps the psychology of the characters and the present-tense action and delivers, directly to viewers, a celebratory commemoration of Donna.
Those flashbacks, set in 1979 and 1980, tell the story of Donna when she graduated from college (Oxford) and headed to Kalokairi by way of Paris. They offer younger versions of Donna, her friends, and her three lovers, and they’re the heart of the movie, owing in large part to the performance of Lily James, as young Donna, who brings a dramatic depth and substance with a seemingly calm effortlessness to a role that’s written as if on postcards. Young Donna is introduced as the valedictorian of her graduating class, and her speech quickly bursts into song, joined by young Tanya (Jessica Keenan Wynn) and young Rosie (Alexa Davies).
Parker, working with the choreographer Anthony Van Laast, offers production numbers that are more fanciful than those of the earlier film but which, with only a few exceptions, are less satisfying, because they are for the most part filmed with the inventiveness and spontaneity of a Super Bowl halftime show. This is all the more surprising inasmuch as the movie’s cinematographer, Robert Yeoman, is among the most original of the time—he has worked on all of Wes Anderson’s live-action features. His contribution to Parker’s dance scenes are most conspicuous in the best of the musical numbers (for “Waterloo”), one that’s set in an absurdly large and sumptuously decorated Parisian restaurant. Donna has a meet-cute with young Harry (Hugh Skinner) in the lobby of a rumpled hotel; soon they’re sharing a meal at which he bursts into romantic song and she joins him, in a series of fantasy moments that are reminiscent of rectilinear Andersonian capers.
There’s a peculiar idea, a curious prefabricated sociology, underpinning the diptych. It’s the story of a strong and independent young woman who follows her heart—and her desires—freely, who successfully realizes her life plan and raises a smart and capable daughter who nonetheless has an altogether more conventional set of dreams and expectations. Without a father figure in her life, Sophie summons the three men who might be her father; all three of them, young dorks who left Donna behind to make their own way through life, become successful on their own terms but remain emotionally unfulfilled. Belatedly, and through the agency of Sophie, they return to Donna and find a ready-made family that they plug themselves into, bringing their bourgeois worldliness and experience to the handmade, sweat-made, more natural and more rugged but provincial beauties that Donna has made (but which aren’t quite enough for Sophie, who hasn’t herself made them but merely been raised in them).
The entire symbolic heft of the series is in the very presence of Streep in the role of Donna. She sings and dances, but she doesn’t even have to; she only has to be there in order to exalt Donna as a self-willed, supremely transformative powerhouse. (Her brief presence in “Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again” is deftly, movingly threaded into the action.) James has a tough job—to suggest a Streep-like level of composure and purpose along with the inchoate energies and risky uncertainties of youth—which makes her performance all the more impressive.
The new movie’s generational reach, of course, includes Cher this time around, as Ruby, Donna’s mother and Sophie’s grandmother. It’s a brief but lavish role that’s rendered wraith-like in its inadequate scripting, and Cher does as much with it as the text allows. Parker’s direction is no help at all; his sense of sentiment runs far ahead of his sense of glamour and spectacle. The same narrow vision that keeps the dance scenes turgid also keeps Cher from being more than a mere signifier of herself; Parker’s direction doesn’t respond to Cher, it confines her.
Nonetheless, there’s an irrepressible charm to the sight of the gathered performers singing and dancing with a festive vitality. It’s hardly different from a peek at a good party, and it’s got hardly more artistic imagination animating it. “Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again,” however, saves the best for last. It features a touch that’s so exquisite, simple, and obvious—a sort of end-credit sequence that Parker has the good idea to keep in the body of the film—that it would be worse to elide than it is to spoil. Implausibly, fantastically, but delightfully, all of the characters, through the generations, are brought together in one grand revel—young and mature Donna, her friends Rosie and Tanya then and now, the three men and their callow selves—as if dancing with themselves. It’s a concluding touch with all the naïveté of a high-school skit, and it bursts through the programmatic gloss of the story to restore its whimsical amateur inspiration.
