From left, Christine Baranski, Meryl Streep and Julie Walters break into song (again) in the musical romantic comedy Mamma Mia! (Universal Pictures)

For Meryl Streep to wring such joy from a rendition of Super Trouper while wearing hideous flares and platform shoes or such regret from a performance of The Winner Takes It All while traipsing perilously close to the edge of a cliff is yet more proof that she is America’s greatest living actress. Oh, sure, she’s got a lot of Oscars already, but another one can’t hurt. Only a performer of her calibre could transform the often awkward E.S.L. lyrics of Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus (e.g. “the judges will decide/ the likes of me abide”) into a true cri de coeur. “That,” as Jon Lovitz’s Master Thespian used to say on Saturday Night Live, “is acting!”

Though Streep showcased her voice to charming effect in Robert Altman’s 2006 swan song A Prairie Home Companion, Mamma Mia! marks the first time she’s performed in a fully fledged movie musical. The fact that her remarkable debut comes in a passably charming, hugely popular but thinly conceived tribute to Sweden’s best-loved pop act is not an ideal situation, but Streep makes the most of it. She stars as Donna, the owner of a dilapidated hotel on a Greek island preparing for the imminent marriage of her daughter Sophie (Amanda Seyfried). Unbeknownst to Donna, the young woman has invited three of her mother’s exes in hopes of discovering the identity of her father. They are straitlaced banker Harry (Colin Firth), wildman adventurer Bill (Stellan Skarsgard) and still-suave architect Sam (Pierce Brosnan). Like nearly everything else in the movie — and unlike nearly every moment in real life — Donna’s efforts to grapple with the disappointments of her past often take the form of an ABBA song.

It’s not so difficult for Streep to outdo many of her co-stars in terms of vocal prowess. The three male leads are shockingly ill-qualified, sounding variously like a European football hooligan (Skarsgard), Al Stewart circa Year of the Cat (Firth) and a man trying to pass a kidney stone (Brosnan). But Streep achieves something greater than that by giving such a potentially slight endeavour so much force and feeling. Really, she’s better than the material deserves.

With her onside, Mamma Mia! will surely hit the sweet spot for the theatregoers who helped the original stage production garner $2 billion US worldwide since its West End London debut in 1999. Knowing better than to mess with a mega-hit, the show’s original creative team – writer Catherine Johnson, co-producer Judy Craymer and director Phyllida Lloyd – use the original blueprint for the movie adaptation, though that’s not always to their story’s benefit. What seemed spirited on stage can seem frenzied on screen — one must assume the set’s craft services tables contained nothing but Red Bull and amphetamines. The gamboling, pratfalls and other instances of physical comedy – chiefly supplied by the very game duo of Julie Walters and Christine Baranski as Donna’s former partners in a girl group – seem so exaggerated here that the movie bears less resemblance to any Hollywood musical than it does to an old episode of The Benny Hill Show.

Donna Sheridan (Meryl Streep, left) has a mother-to-daughter chat with Sophie (Amanda Seyfried). (Universal Pictures)

The needlessly busy editing style and inelegant camerawork owe just as much to ‘80s pop videos, a reference that Lloyd herself seems to make when the garish Money, Money, Money sequence shifts into a parody of Russell Mulcahy’s iconic clip for Duran Duran’s Rio. (If there are any other ex-Duranies keeping score, the Voulez Vous scene when the groom’s pals crash the hen party while wearing strange masks is way more Wild Boys.) Even weirder sights abound, like the glimpses of Harry back when he was a punk rocker in a studded dog collar, or Sam when he looked like a roadie for Steppenwolf. The movie is remarkably inclusive when it comes to eliciting nostalgic feelings from its viewers — it jumbles together references from the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s.

Lloyd and company’s go-big-or-go-home ethos is successful (like when a giddy parade of women make an anthem out of Dancing Queen) and wrong-headed (what’s with the guys-in-flippers dance routine for Lay All Your Love On Me?) in equal measure. But Mamma Mia!’s spirit of fun is hard to resist. And as long as Streep is on screen and Brosnan is keeping his mouth shut, the film is surprisingly rich in feeling. In this symbol of late-life regret and motherly self-sacrifice, the 59-year-old Streep has managed to create a real woman with believable emotions in spite of the musical’s overabundance of paper-thin characterizations, half-baked plot contrivances and banal (if, yes, irresistibly catchy) songs. Whether it’s Streep’s bravura performance of The Winner Takes It All or her more delicate rendition of Slipping Through My Fingers, the music of ABBA never hurt so good.

Mamma Mia! opens across Canada on July 18.

Jason Anderson is a writer based in Toronto.