The erroneous choices of catastrophic Broadway musical adaptation Dear Evan Hansen begin with the curious casting of Ben Platt, reprising the titular lead role that earned him a Tony award and thrust the performer into the limelight. On paper, he’s obviously a viable contender to translate this popular character from stage to screen, but one vital detail was blatantly overlooked. Evan Hansen is an anxiety-ridden high schooler, and Platt, who was 27 at the time of filming, resembles this age bracket roughly as much as the fatally misguided film he headlines is tactful, which is staggeringly little.
Director Stephen Chbosky’s new film approaches the delicate kaleidoscope of the teenage experience, most notably mental illness, with a startling lack of sensitivity and depth, exploiting it for shallow dramatic capital. This is particularly baffling since the author-turned-filmmaker has captured the turmoil of adolescence in, if not groundbreaking, refreshingly nuanced films like The Perks of Being a Wallflower and Wonder, but when the material he’s saddled with is so, frankly, outwardly problematic, his adequate talents devolve and exacerbate the inherent shortcomings, much like the de-aging makeup slathered on Platt that only seems to distractingly underline the fundamental issues imbedded within their intent.
Dear Evan Hansen is so brashly clumsy with its subject matter that the film threatens to derail at any waking moment, and this stems from the precarious tracks, pinned to the screen with flat musical numbers, that its narrative is built upon. The meek Evan has been plagued with crippling social anxiety since childhood, taking several medications daily to mitigate this. His therapist (not featured in the film, its haphazard decisions bred frightfully early) prescribes an unorthodox method: Evan should write himself letters of encouragement each morning before school, regardless of his broken arm.
This lonely, outcasted senior encounters another pariah student Connor Murphy (Colton Ryan) who also suffers from mental ailments, these extremely volatile. In a moment of grace, Connor signs Evan’s cast but discovers one of his letters, which details his crush on his sister Zoe (Kaitlyn Dever). Connor assumes he is being manipulated by Evan’s romantic pining and volcanically evades the scene, plot device in hand. A few days later, Connor’s parents Cynthia (Amy Adams) and Larry (Danny Pino) inform Evan that their son has tragically committed suicide, and they have mistaken Evan’s letter as a suicide note to him. What ensues is a destructive, mountainous snowball of misunderstanding as Evan fabricates a friendship with the Murphys’ fallen son, complete with contrived emails, that borders on gaslighting.
Dear Evan Hansen attempts to play the heartstrings like a fiddle, but the cinematic musicians here are detrimentally tone-deaf. Evan’s accumulating deceit and chicaneries are exceedingly reprehensible, and narratively they’re executed in a way that nonetheless condones him. Sure, these light sprinklings of lies originated as an act of sympathy before accumulating into percussive, toxic storms of Evan’s orchestration, but it’s also discernible that he has deployed Connor as a mouthpiece for his own self-expression and social clout (the song “Sincerely, Me” is particularly appalling) – it’s downright sociopathic. The film is poised to bring some potentially important discussions into fruition, including the price of healing, mental health visibility and awareness and even socioeconomic disparities through the lens of youth, but it hermetically lacks any viable perspective or dimensionality to do so, instead opting for the most cloying, superficial attempts at reductive emotional resonance.
For all his preexisting gifts, Chbosky doesn’t comprehend the essence of a compelling movie musical sequence, and the ones here are as shapeless and heavy-handed as they come; we’re approaching Nine-levels of inertia here, folks. When adapting a stage musical into a film, it’s imperative to transfer that artifice across the diametrically different mediums. John M. Chu this year excelled at shaping In the Heights into something vigorously cinematic, but Chbosky’s approach is stagnantly literal. He confines his performers into pedestrian, compact spaces made even more lifeless by the sparse production design. The same hallway is reused perpetually like it’s a sitcom, and the song “For Forever,” which is groomed to be that cathartic climax of the first act, even excruciatingly occurs at a dinner table with minimal movement.
Contrasting with Chbosky’s counterintuitive bare-bones direction, Platt’s performance is heinously overwrought. I’ve liked him in other projects, but every beat he generates in this film chaotically oscillates between different emotional extremes without weaving in authentic dramatic touchstones. Though his heavenly singing voice remains intact, he somehow renders as erratic and mawkish with his overly externalized portrayal striking with the subtlety of a sledgehammer.
The robust supporting cast capably compensates, though. Seasoned veterans like Adams and Julianne Moore (as Evan’s earnest, working-class single mother, though egregiously squandered until the final act) and up-and-comers like Dever and Amandla Stenberg (whose compassionate student character spearheads a mental illness fundraiser in honor of Connor’s memory) muster some poignant moments, despite the disaster engulfing them. The underlying, lacerating issue is that the gimmick of this film- Evan’s subterfuge packaged as disingenuous uplift- constantly stifles these radically more interesting thespians and characters; the most flagrant, underdeveloped plot thread is the Murphys grappling with the complicated memory of their rageful son with meager insights.
It’s difficult to impart a lesson of understanding and acceptance when you don’t grasp the full magnitude of your actions; this applies to Evan himself, who is absolved quite easily in the end, and the cinematic misfire he woefully occupies. The most conspicuously ill-advised choices manifest in the quiet bits when the vacuous sequences cannot conceal the storytelling’s fatal flaws. Cynthia graciously leads Evan into her deceased son’s room, Connor’s chilling absence still defining its ambiance. Instead of absorbing and distilling the haunting human truths of its respective characters’ plights, Chbosky haphazardly cuts to a hole Connor had feverishly punched in the wall, scorching any empathy that could have been forged from the ashes. Dear Evan Hansen may be laden with bombastic musical numbers, but few of its notes ring true.
Grade: D
Dear Evan Hansen is now available in theaters.
Photo Credit / Universal Studios
