This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon: July 22, 2008 - Hey, kids! Let's put on a show. We can use the old barn out back! I've got a tent we can turn into a curtain, and a stack of old ABBA records, and ... I think we can get Meryl Streep!
Before I get ahead of myself ...
I think it's time we finally admitted that the movie musical - a genre declared dead about 35 years ago - is alive and reasonably well. Looking back on the last year alone, four of my favorite films - "I'm Not There," "Across the Universe," "Sweeney Todd" and "Once" - were musicals. Also of note were the immensely entertaining "Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story" and "Hairspray." Factor in the handful of hip-hop dance films like "Stomp the Yard," the phenomenal "High School Musical" films and the increasing number of documentaries and concert films, and it would appear that "All talking! All singing! All dancing!" movies have finally regained a good-sized share of screen time.
The movie musical was killed - or at least put into a long hibernation - by a variety of things, including the end of the classic studio system, changing styles in popular music and, most damagingly, its own success after the record-breaking amounts of money raked in by "The Sound of Music" prompted a long list of high-profile, overproduced failures. Despite semi-annual attempts to revive the genre and even an occasional fluke of a success, the standard take on musical films has been that they were an anachronism, a sentimental genre that modern audiences were too sophisticated to tolerate. It's time to throw that notion out. The musical, as the handful of 2007 films already cited indicates, has proved its resilience.
For proof, look no further than "Mamma Mia!" Onstage, "Mamma Mia!" was probably the slimmest evening of theater you could imagine, with a plot that could be summarized on a matchbook and still have space left over. Built around a catalog of ABBA songs, the story is a contrivance - a young girl on the eve of her wedding endeavors to discover the identity of her father - that could have just as easily served in "New Sensations of 1922," stretched over two acts for no reason other than to carry its characters from "S.O.S." to "Take a Chance on Me."
A large part of the appeal of the show was simply in seeing if these pop records of 30 years ago could prop up such a slim plot (though it could also be seen as an obstacle for too-hip-for-the-room American audiences who never really embraced ABBA in the '70s and can't help looking for some sort of ironic distance). If the performance I saw a few years ago is typical, even the actors onstage seem to realize that they're simply filling time between songs, so once the major plot points have been tied up, they simply chuck it all and leap into a final medley with enthusiasm worthy of Mickey and Judy at their barn-raising best. Surprisingly, it works, if you're willing to make the leap with them.
One of the best things about the filmed version of "Mamma Mia!" - and there are many very good things about it, not the least of them being Meryl Streep, who leaps with the best of them - is that director Phyllida Lloyd seems to understand exactly why such a slight stage confection (which she also directed) worked and has translated it to the screen unapologetically and more or less faithfully. The movie version is every bit as fluffy, and the story is still wafer-thin. But it's been propped up by a great cast (which, in addition to Streep, has Pierce Brosnan, Julie Walters, Stellan Skarsgard, Colin Firth and the show-stopping Christine Baranski) - and that makes a huge difference. The fairytale qualities of the story as it played onstage - a young girl's fantasy about her mother and her origins - are turned on their head, and the film becomes instead a story about middle-aged characters making their own claims on romance.
So they sing. And dance. And indulge themselves by running around an exotic Greek island enjoying a handful of silly/timeless pop songs. What seemed somewhat forced and contrived onstage has become much warmer, although no less frivolous, now that we can get closer to the characters and attach movie-star faces to them. Musicals, probably more than any other genre, require an almost complete suspension of disbelief, and "Mamma Mia!" is as unbelievable as the best of them. We're in a season of fantasy and disbelief, of course, with superheroes and talking animals, real-life cartoons and cute robots filling most of the local screens. I'll take Meryl Streep singing "Dancing Queen" over any of them.
That other movie
And speaking of the other movie that opened last week, I suspect that when the dust has cleared and the sheer kinetic energy of Christopher Nolan's second Batman installment has finally worn off, some viewers may feel the effects of a slight reality hangover and find themselves asking, "What just happened?" At two-and-a-half nonstop hours, "The Dark Knight" is a technical marvel. Heath Ledger's is inspired, brilliant, even - probably a first for a comic book villain - genuinely disturbing. Nolan's decision to replace the art-deco-meets-"Metropolis" design of the last entry with the real-world look of downtown Chicago is a challenging and effective move. The introduction of the film's second villain, Two-Face (Aaron Eckhart), is carefully developed and well played. The performances - Gary Oldman, Michael Caine, Maggie Gyllenhaal, even Eric Roberts - are uniformly better than most superhero movies deserve.
But when all is said and done - what just happened? This is a grimmer Batman, as just about everyone has already noted, but is it a coherent one? The side discussions about vigilantism and society's need for heroes are, I suspect, just sophomoric filler. With so much going on around him, poor Batman (Christian Bale) is somewhat shell-shocked by the end, and the final scenes are ambiguous enough to suggest that the film is, like "The Empire Strikes Back," really just a kind of place-holder for (one hopes) a more definitive conclusion to follow. It's hard not to be overwhelmed by "The Dark Knight" - I guess that could be considered praise - but isn't it a little strange to have a Batman film in which the Caped Crusader is the least interesting part, outshined in heroism by Commissioner Gordon?