Take a Chance on Mamma Mia?

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In the end, the movie beats down even the most stalwart viewer's resistance, in a Guantánamo of giddiness. The supporting actresses help out. Baranski, slim and large-mouthed, and Walters, wizened and hiding behind shades, might be Mick and Keith in a Rolling Stones girl tribute band, and they lend all their show-biz savvy to vivid renditions of, respectively, Does Your Mother Know and Take a Chance on Me. Seyfried, from the HBO series Big Love, is in full control of Sophie, the film's one sensible character. And Streep comes back to earth in a handsomely calibrated rendition of the power ballad The Winner Takes It All. By the end-credit sequence, when the stars appear in spandex outfits to reprise Dancing Queen, the audience may be singing along as if they'd overdosed on ouzo.

The older ones, anyway. For them, this is prime nostalgia. For those too young to remember the Abba years, it's just faux-stalgia. But even that has its allure. It can turn a hapless movie into a fun one. And if you don't like the Mamma Mia! film, you can still hum those tunes all the way home.

It was as if the U.S. sent out an sos and Abba supplied the perfect rescue vehicle VIEWPOINT, PAGE 59