It is safe to say that Streep gives the worst performance of her career — safe to say because it is so clearly what she intends, and she is not an actress capable of failure. There is a degree of fascination in watching an Oscar-winning Yale School of Drama graduate mug and squirm, shimmy and shriek and generally fill every moment with antic, purposeless energy, as if she were hogging the spotlight in an eighth-grade musical.
She is saved, and also upstaged, by Walters and, especially, by Baranski, whose cougar-on-the-prowl rendition of Does Your Mother Know is the one genuinely, show-stoppingly sexy sequence in a film that more often flails between forced cheekiness and unearned sentiment.
I know: I promised you a good time, and I’m describing a train wreck. But it’s hard not to share the evident delight of most of the performers. Streep overdoes it, yes, but you can’t accuse her of condescending to the material any more than you can fault her for taking it too seriously.
The impression left by the old pros who make up most of the cast is that they have nothing to be ashamed of and nothing to prove, and that worrying about dignity is for newbies and amateurs. So Brosnan bellows his way through a couple of duets, Skarsgard displays his tattooed buttocks, and Firth consents to appear in a spiked dog collar.
Seyfried has a harder time, though not for any lack of effort or talent. She has to work while the old timers are having fun, and to carry the picture’s unconvincing, flat-footed attempts at melodrama. But Seyfried, who has proven her skill on Big Love and elsewhere, is likely to emerge from Mamma Mia! unscathed. Really, this movie is incapable of harming anyone, except moviegoers with the good taste and bad manners to resist its relentless, ridiculous charm.
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