There is no shame in loving ABBA. It took me longer than it should have to figure that out.
The second Mamma Mia film arrived in the summer of 2018 carrying a premise that should not have worked: a prequel-sequel hybrid in which a young Donna Sheridan (Lily James, astonishing) traces her 1979 European summer in flashback while her daughter Sophie (Amanda Seyfried) prepares to reopen the Kalokairi hotel. Two timelines, the same songs, Cher appearing in the third act like a visitation from a higher plane. It worked because the music was always the point.
The Songs, Again
Producer Benny Andersson returned — as he did for the first film — to oversee the arrangements, and what that means in practice is that nobody took liberties they couldn’t justify. “When I Kissed the Teacher” opens the record with a kind of caffeinated joy that Lily James commits to completely, the orchestration just shy of the original’s disco-era sheen. “I Wonder” she handles with genuine restraint, which is harder than it sounds when the song was written for Agnetha Fältskog’s soprano.
Josh Dylan, playing young Sam, gets “Knowing Me, Knowing You” and treats it like a breakup that actually happened to him. Jeremy Irvine and Hugh Skinner, as young Harry and young Bill, navigate “Waterloo” with the cheerful recklessness the song demands. These are not karaoke performances. Richard Curtis, who contributed to the screenplay, apparently understood that the films live or die by whether the actors believe the lyrics in the moment they sing them. Most of them do.
The Classic Cast
Meryl Streep’s presence in the film is limited by the plot — Donna has died before the story begins — and so the soundtrack gives you her absence, which lands harder than it should. Christine Baranski’s “My Love, My Life” near the end of the record is one of the more quietly devastating things in either film. She and Julie Walters earn the emotion they’re working with.
Then there is Cher. She appears on “Fernando,” a song that was not originally in Mamma Mia! the stage musical but was a standalone Swedish hit that has circled this franchise for years waiting for its moment. With Andy García singing opposite her, it is exactly as ridiculous and committed and right as you want it to be. Andersson had the good sense to stay out of the way.
The London cast recorded at Olympic Studios in Barnes — the room where Led Zeppelin and the Stones had worked, now repurposed but not diminished. Engineer Steve Price and a full orchestra under the direction of Martin Koch gave the tracks the width you need when you’re scoring an island in the Aegean. Koch’s arrangements for the climactic “Super Trouper” sequence, with Streep’s voice folded back into the living cast, remain the best argument for what this franchise understands about grief and joy running together.
There is a version of this album you dismiss because it’s mainstream and sequelled and commercial. That version of yourself is missing the fact that “Dancing Queen” makes people cry at funerals, at weddings, in cars alone on the motorway at eleven at night. Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus wrote songs that do not care whether you think they’re serious. They outlasted punk, disco, grunge, everything. They’ll outlast this too.
Put on “The Day Before You Came” from the bonus tracks — Lily James again — and tell me this is throwaway.