Dear Evan Hansen
Stephen Chbosky's big screen adaptation of the Tony winning musical has good intentions but is a unremarkable, muddled mess.
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Movie musicals have been around for almost as long as the art form itself, but it feels as if in recent years there has been a resurgence of shorts of the movie musical. While typically there’s only one or two major musicals a year, 2021 along has already had plenty. From the optimistic and exuberant “In The Heights”, the artsy and ambitious “Annette”, the LGBTQ+ friendly “Everybody’s Talking About Jamie”, or the revisionist fairy tale “Cinderella”, there’s already been plenty. Hollywood isn’t quite done yet either with Steven Spielberg’s highly anticipated “West Side Story”, Lin Manuel-Miranda’s directorial debut “Tick, Tick… Boom!”, and Joe Wright’s Oscar-hopeful “Cyrano” still on the horizon.
Stephen Chbosky and Universal hope to score high with their big screen adaptation of the Tony award winning musical “Dear Evan Hansen”, and they even managed to rope in the original star of the Broadway show, Ben Platt to star in the lead role.
The film follows high school senior Evan Hansen (Platt) who struggles with severe social anxiety and depression and is lacking in the friend department outside of his snarky self-proclaimed “family friend” Jared (Nik Dodani). After an incident involving climbing a tree, Evan ends up with his arm in a cast, which his overworked but loving mother Heidi (Julianne Moore) encourages him to get people to sign.
After printing out an assignment from his therapist where he has to write a letter to himself, he encounters the troubled and relentlessly bullied Connor Murphy (Colton Ryan), who writes his name in big letters across Evan’s cast and takes Evan’s letter. When he realizes that part of the letter talks about his sister and Evan’s crush Zoe (Kaitlyn Dever), he angrily takes the note and runs away.
The next day at school Evan is called to the principal’s office where he meets Connor’s mother and stepfather Cynthia and Larry (Amy Adams, Danny Pino) who inform him that Connor had taken his own life the night before and found Evan’s note in his pocket, believing that it was their son’s suicide note written to Evan, who they believed was his only true friend. Despite Evan attempting to tell the truth, their belief is strengthened when they see Connor’s name on Evan’s cast.
After being invited over to the Murphy’s house for dinner, Evan decides to go along with the family’s belief that he shared a special bond with their son, finding it alleviating and finally giving him a sense of belonging. The lie soon starts to spread throughout the school where Evan then works with the outgoing and popular Alana (Amandla Stenberg) to fund the Connor Project, to crowdfund the orchard that Evan claimed Connor took him to when he broke his arm.
The main criticism being tossed around “Dear Evan Hansen” which was even dominant before the film was released, is the fact that the 27-year-old Platt is far too old to be playing the 17-year-old lead character. Despite the fact that he did originate the role, right from the get-go Platt’s age is glaring detriment to the film. While many of Platt’s co-stars are also well past the high-school age, there was at least an effort made to cast younger looking actors.
Platt on the other hand, regardless of his incredible singing voice, looks like he belongs alongside Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill in “21 Jump Street”. Platt is clearly trying his best in making it work and there is somewhat of an effort to make the actor look younger from his curly hair and large dimples, but it inadvertently makes the star look even older. It shouldn’t be too much of a surprise that Platt was cast in the role as his father Marc Platt was a producer of the film, but when several of the actors who succeeded him on Broadway haven’t even turned 20 yet, it’s clear the casting department could have done better.
The supporting cast surrounding Platt is thankfully more believable and some of them turn in some genuinely noteworthy performances. Dever truly shines as Zoe and is a natural at channeling the meek and emotionally drained nature of her character. The other stand-out of the film is clearly Moore as Heidi, who after being mysteriously underutilized for the first two thirds of the film, is responsible for the film’s sole emotionally effective moment as she performs “So Big/So Small”.
Stenberg turns in some impressive work as well as Alana, after making waves in films such as “The Hate U Give” and “The Hunger Games”, her work in “Dear Evan Hansen” may be her best yet. She feels authentic in the role and is able to capture both the outgoing as well as the insecure sides of her character. Adams and Pino are serviceable in their roles, particularly Pino who brings humanity to the role of Larry, but unfortunately for Adams this is far from her best work.
Chbosky has shown to be gifted at directing crowdpleasers that focus on the younger generation with his first two films “The Perks Of Being A Wallflower” and “Wonder”, but his direction here is unremarkable. The musical numbers are almost nonexistent, while the songs are there and many of them are exceptional, the film commits the ultimate sin of making them feel like an afterthought. While dancing and flash mobs certainly would not have fit the film, the music’s execution is bland and without any sense of personality, in fact some of them even feel jarring.
The story itself is clearly made with the best of intentions and even delivers some important messages on mental health as well as themes on how we react to a premature death, but the film ultimately feels muddled in its delivery. All but one of the film’s dozens of attempts to tug on the heartstrings fails miserably and instead comes across as either hokey, manufactured, and even problematic.
While the film asks its audience to feel empathy for the questionable decisions made by the characters, it never tells us exactly they should outside of the fact that these characters are struggling themselves. The content within the film and the topics it juggles is a complicated task for any film to take on, but the fact of the matter is we’ve seen Chbosky handle similar themes before with such brilliance and elegance in his previous films, that it makes the film all the more disappointing.
There will surely be audiences out there who will fall in love with “Dear Evan Hansen” and will be able to ignore all its shortcomings, the musical was a hit for a reason after all. Alas, the film’s glaring weaknesses fiercely overshadow almost all of the bright spots leaving nothing left other than one of the most bland and unambitious musicals to grace the screen in years.