LINDSAY MENDEZ, JONATHAN GROFF, DANIEL RADCLIFFE IN MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG

Life looks sadder backwards

TRAILER

The ultimate sentimentality may be the pessimism of saying beginnings are all that matters and the rest is letdown and disappointment. And when you have a collaboration like Merrily We Roll Along's two-man musicals team of composer Franklin Shepard (Jonathan Groff) and writer Charley Kringas (Daniel Radcliffe), incompatibilities make the future turn into not just a letdown but a betrayal. That is the sad message of Stephen Sondheim's early eighties "flop" Merrily We Roll Along, rescued successfully in successive decades, whose recent zinger of a production by the late Maria Friedman has been handsomely preserved in a new film distributed by Sony.

So as we start out in this reverse-chronology musical, the relationship of Frank and Charlie has gone very sour by the late seventies. Successive leaps back to the sixties and finally the late fifties explore why. No real revelations here, though. Frank wanted commercial success all along. By the end he had become a Hollywood producer and estranged from his original partner and pal. He had been the one who pushed for musicals n the first place: Frank wanted to be a straight-out playwright. Sondheim is putting in a plea for his chosen genre here, saying it's the way to work from the heart, not just the head (gesturing toward head and heart), and reaching the greater number with the greater directness with the powerful message.

Frank's liking for the commercial always rubbed Charley the wrong way. Ultimate segments staged in the fifties when Frank and Charley first met and were discovered by their neighbor the budding writer Mary Flynn (Lindsey Mendez) and the other women in their lives (notably those played by Krystal Joy Brown and Katie Rose Clarke) are full of hope and the first recognitions of talent and first blossoming of friendship. If we remember back to the play's beginning, all that later had gone sour, and Mary, after much success with her novels, had by the end become a total alcoholic.

This musical by Sondheim, which failed in the early eighties, was restaged in the nineties and more recently mounted with great success in in England (Friedman's homeland) then transplanted to Off-Broadway, finally in a hot-ticket Broadway production receiving positive reviews from Ben Brantley (returned from retirement to write a rave in the Times ) and other critics like Michael Billington (an early champion, he says) in the Guardian and a prediction of Broadway success by David Rooney in Hollywood Reporter.

They say this is Sondheim at his best, with sparkling lyrics and engaging music. I guess that's true. This is a simple production (except for lots of costume changes - which become more and more bright and appealing as we move backwards) with entertaining and very, very engaging performances. It's the structure, however (in which Sondheim follows his source, a same-name 1934 play by Rogers and Hart), that is a brain-twister - or would be, if it weren't so simplistic: it's all there from the first scenes, which are the story. The trouble is that chronological development is hard to show going backwards, and what is the revelation? The negative one, it would appear, that life goes downhill; that what's best are the first moments when all of life still lies ahead. If you don't buy such a deterministic outlook, as I can't, you can admire the performances and the songs - most successfully Charlie-Daniel Radcliffe's show-stopper at the half-hour point, as well as several big ensemble numbers after that - while finding this musical's outlook unconvincing otherwise.

The final trio of Mary, Frank and Charley, "Me and You," promises a false hopefulness (given what we know) and also a false awareness as all "we'll look back on this moment some day and say. . . " sentiments in plays do, combining foreknowledge that exists more on stage than in life. But what am I fussing about? This is a musical. The song's rousing still, and the final moment focused silently on the terrific Jonathan Groff's still pure and hopeful-looking face, is still irresistibly touching. The overcharged audience could walk out feeling uplifted and rewarded. Even if deceived. Like musicals do.

This film is an decent if not exceptional record of a stage production. But you may prefer, as I do, watching Richard Linklater's new film Blue Moon with Ethan Hawke's remarkable performance as the declining librettist Lorenz Hart of the prolific thirties and forties Rodgers and Hart musical team, whose alcoholism has caused the famous collaboration to dissolve. In contrast to Sondheim's life-spanning-in-reverse scheme, Blue Moon views its universe in the grain of sand of a few realtime hours. But Linklater seems to like Sondheim's reverse-chronology idea too, because word is he's mounting his own version of Merrily. It will star Paul Mescal, Beanie Feldstein, and Ben Platt and be filmed over twenty years, a sort of reverse Boyhood.

Merrily We Roll Along, 150 mins., premiered at the Hamptons Oct. 25, 2025, showing also at Montclair and AFI. US theatrical release Dec. 5. Metacritic rating: 78%.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.