i need everyone to understand that mamma mia is not just a movie to me it is a lifestyle a personality trait a religious experience. like i don’t “watch” it i return to it. i orbit it. i exist in a constant state of thinking about donna sheridan spinning on that dock like the world cannot touch her and honestly it can’t.
this movie is the ultimate feminist movie and i will die on this hill. not in a “girlboss” way but in a messy, human, complicated women kind of way. donna is not punished for loving freely. she is not reduced to regret. she built a life, a home, a daughter, out of chaos and memory and joy.
and the film never once tries to shame her for it. instead it surrounds her with women—friends, daughters, versions of herself—and lets them all be loud and flawed and alive.
and what makes it even better is that this isn’t accidental. the director, the writer, the creative force behind it—women. you can feel it in the way the story refuses to center men, refuses to moralize donna’s past, refuses to shrink any of its female characters into something digestible. it’s women telling a story about women, and it shows.
also stellan skarsgård literally said that in this movie the men are the “bimbos,” and i think about that daily. because it’s true. they’re decorative, they’re confused, they’re emotional, and the women are the ones driving the story, holding the power, taking up space. it’s such a perfect, playful reversal of everything we’re used to seeing.
also i know we’re not supposed to pick a father. i know the whole point is that it doesn’t matter. but i have thoughts.
i went into this rooting for sam. like of course i did. he’s the love story. he’s the one the narrative builds up, the one you’re supposed to feel something for.
i’m sorry it’s literally bill.
sophie says she’ll know when she sees her father and the first person she truly connects with is bill. the first one she sings with, the first one she asks. and more than that, they mirror each other—restless, curious, always searching for something more. she doesn’t have sam’s steadiness. she has bill’s sense of movement, his pull toward the unknown, his relationship with the sea.
like you cannot watch her jump into the water and tell me that is not bill’s daughter.
but the movie is smarter than that. it gives you all the clues and then quietly removes the need for an answer. sophie starts off believing she’s incomplete without knowing her father, and ends up realizing she was never missing anything at all. it was never about him. it was about her.
(and yes, that’s the part where the movie casually becomes about identity and introspection and i lose my mind.)
and meryl streep. oh my god meryl streep. she makes donna feel so alive, like every laugh and every heartbreak has history behind it. she is a multiple-time oscar winner for a reason.
mamma mia is chaos and sunlight and women who refuse to shrink themselves. it’s not about fathers. it’s about freedom. and also bill is the dad thank you for coming to my ted talk.