I took our eldest to see Mamma Mia at the cinema this afternoon. Loaded down with drinks, popcorn and chocolate, we got great seats and enjoyed every minute of it. I’m not ashamed to say I had tears running down my cheeks more than once. I looked across at my young charge’s face from time to time - greeted with a little girl jigging to the music, feeding her face with a never ending stream of popcorn, and laughing like a drain at the antics of Meryl Streep, Julie Walters and Co.
The only downer on the entire afternoon was a moral dilemma. I’ll need to explain.
Shortly after taking our seats in the cinema - which after buying tickets, popcorn and drinks cost us something in the region of 20 ($40), a group of mentally handicapped people came in also, and sat just down the row from us with their carers. Throughout most of the movie they talked, shouted, screamed, cried, and generally disrupted the rest of the audience. Nobody said or did anything.
Here’s the question - should somebody have said or done something? Although their actions were of course no fault of their own, should the carers have tried at least to do something?
Had the movie contained any meaningful dialogue it would have rendered it unwatchable. If anybody had complained, they would almost certainly have been labelled a monster by everybody present, considered prejudiced, and be seen as promoting the idea that handicapped people have no place in society.
Tolerance is a difficult idea to embrace sometimes.
p.s. Piers Brosnan is almost as bad at singing as everybody said, and yes, I did spot Benny playing the piano in the scene where the girls run down to the harbour.