Film

Dear Evan Hanson is that rare film that is somehow both worse and better than you’ve probably heard. The adaptation of the (somewhat questionably) Tony-winning Best Musical simply does not work for the screen. And yet the casting of the now visibly aged Ben Platt reprising his youthful Tonywinning lead role is not nearly as jarring as Twitter reactions would suggest. If you’re not familiar with the concept behind Dear Evan Hansen, strap in, because it’s a doozy. Platt plays Evan, a high schooler struggling with anxiety, depression, and a want to belong. As part of his “homework” for his ongoing therapy sessions, he writes letters to himself about how he’s feeling, and makes the mistake of printing one such letter at school.

From there, Connor, a loner with anger issues, steals the letter, embarrassing the already emotionally fragile Evan. But what happens next, I don’t think Evan, or anyone in the audience sees coming. Evan is called to the school office, where he meets Connor’s parents (Amy Adams and Danny Pino). Turns out, Connor committed suicide, and they found the letter addressed to Evan on his person, interpreting it as Connor’s last words. Things really snowball from there, with the family jumping to conclusions that Evan and Connor were friends, while Evan is simply too awkward, overcome, and polite to tell the truth. The family invites then Evan into their home, believing he might hold the key to understanding their son, even though sister Zoe (Kaitlyn Dever), firmly believes Connor was a terrible person who caused her trauma. The film, however, really leaves Connor as an enigma, with all the details about his personality and past never really adding up to a character the audience understands. This essentially renders his suicide as a plot device, which given the gravity, just doesn’t feel right. Evan, who has an overworked single mother (Julianne Moore), finds a welcomed presence in Connor’s wealthy family, which embraces him as their own. And he begins to play the part of “Connor’s best friend” a little too well, even using it as a way to start a romantic relationship with Zoe, the girl he long admired from afar.

In the first half of the film, I was able to accept the craziness as it all unfolds like a standard teen drama, but with some weird singing detours. It was when Evan sings at Connor’s memorial and a clip of his performance goes viral that the film just totally lost me. It wasn’t only that the song was so cloying and saccharine, it was that the whole sequence was so painfully hollow, as the video sparks a “movement” illustrated cinematically with some of the laziest, cheesiest, and most manipulative cinematic tropes. The second half of the film is then spent trying to resolve this batshit scenario, and attempting to convince you Evan is not, in fact, the worst person in the world, while his actions get more and more despicable and more problematic. And I don’t know, perhaps seeing this story unfold onscreen and outside of the “safe space” and touchy-feely confines of the theater (as in the dramatic stage), affects my ability to just go along with this abhorrent behavior, but part of me thinks that this particular show is just systemically flawed. Perhaps it does have its heart in the right place though, tacking important issues of grief, mental health, loneliness, and isolation. But the mix of such earnestness with something so grotesque and cynical just doesn’t sit well. And this comes back to some inherent issues not only in the story, but in the filmmaking itself. Director Stephen Chbosky, who also wrote and directed The Perks of Being a Wallflower, one of the most authentic works of teenage mental anguish, takes nearly the same filmmaking approach here, but you get the opposite result, because by also framing Dear Evan Hansen as a realistic indie teen drama, the transitions to song are jarring and confusing in light of the rest of the film’s commitment to realism. That heightened sense of emotion a viewer gets in musicals is gone. But coming to back to the now-infamous casting of Ben Platt, it’s not his looks that will bother you. He is certainly not the first 27-year-old to play a teenager, and this isn’t even close to the most egregious age discrepancy casting we’ll see on screen. And his singing is, simply put, great: You can see why he won the Tony. But his exaggerated body movements are the most irksome part. It’s like this is a role he’s so familiar with on stage, he is physically incapable of playing to a camera instead of a live audience.

His co-stars, meanwhile, give much more nuanced, cinematically-driven performances, including standout Kaitlyn Dever, and the film’s best surprise, Julianne Moore, who sings beautifully. The music as a whole though, like the performance by duo Benj Pasek and Justin Paul (La La Land, The Greates 0t Showman), is just plain flat, as if created by a computer using the prompts “inspiring,” “uplifting,” and “anthem.” In the packed crowd of college students I watched the film with though, they all seemed genuinely moved, judging by the audible crying at several points throughout the film and the eruption of spontaneous applause at its conclusion. Something about the music and the movie’s message sincerely resonated with their experiences, and if the movie did in fact make some of them feel less alone, no matter how despicable or cringey of a manner it did it, I suppose that’s ultimately what matters.

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