Universal Pictures
Full disclosure before delving into this review — I’ve never seen the stage production of Dear Evan Hansen. It was supposed to tour last year and I would have seen it then but, you know, a pandemic got in the way so I am going into the film with no preconceived notions and only the hateful word of mouth that has accompanied the film’s release. So the only thing I can review here is the movie.
Dear Evan Hansen centers around the titular teenager who has severe anxiety issues, to the point that he can’t even order food delivery because he can’t interact with the delivery person. He’s the outcast at school with one friend, who won’t even go so far as to call them anything but ‘family friends’ which is much different, and he has a crush on a girl named Zoe. Zoe also has a brother, Connor, who is an outcast for a very different reason: he’s a huge jerk, at least on the outside, with wild mood swings that pretty much scare everyone off. After an incident in which Connor thinks Evan is laughing at him, he screams in Evans face to stop laughing but not too long after he’s attempting to be Evan’s friend (or he’s just being a jerk again) by signing the cast on his arm, telling Evan they can both pretend they have a friend. One of Evan’s mental health assignments is to write himself letters, the greetings of which are where the show and film get their title, about what kind of day he expects to have. But one such letter wasn’t as upbeat as usual, and when he prints it out at school, Connor finds it and thinks Evan planted it for him to find (it mentions Connor’s sister). Connor takes the letter and Evan is terrified it’s going to end up on social media, but it doesn’t.
The next day Evan is called into the principal’s office to meet with Connor’s parents. They found the letter and want to know more about Connor’s friendship with Evan because this letter is the last thing they have of Connor … he took his own life that day he accosted Evan, and they believe the letter was written to Evan as a sort of suicide note. Evan tries to tell them they’ve got it all wrong but his awkwardness only makes the situation worse because Connor’s parents only want to hear what they want to hear. And Evan begins to play along because he sees how happy his (made up) stories of his friendship with Connor make them. The lie begins to spiral out of control as they want to see more emails, which he has to create, and a memorial fund is created to restore an orchard where Evan says Connor took him. While feeling neglected by his own mother, Evan almost feels like he’s got a new family in the Murphys, but it’s not long before the lie catches up to him.
Dear Evan Hansen certainly has a problematic theme with Evan just building more and more elaborate lies. The question is, is he doing this for himself, to make himself feel better, or is he truly trying to help the Murphy family through their grief? Initially, it seems like the latter. Evan, I don’t think, expected his one little white lie to be met with demands to expand on his fake friendship. His social ineptitude is the excuse for him not being able to tell Connor’s parents right from the start that he wrote the letter to himself, and Connor was just being an ass by writing his name on Evan’s cast. But if we’re supposed to root for the protagonist, Evan, that becomes harder to do as he continues to lie to everyone around him, including his mother. Only his ‘family friend’ Jared knows the truth, and even he’s shocked by how far Evan is taking this. He ends up hurting so many people along the way that it almost makes us as audience members turn against this kid we’re supposed to sympathize with. Perhaps it works differently on stage — and I am aware that there are many major structural changes to the story, with the omission and addition of songs — but as a film it almost leaves us feeling a little gross that we were originally rooting for Evan to find himself and come out of his shell. He certainly did, but not in the way we hoped. And then the film manipulates us a bit into being fearful that Evan will meet the same fate as Connor as the walls come crashing down around him.
While the story may be problematic, the performances are not. Ben Platt originated the role of Evan in 2016 at the age of 23, and that makes him 28 now but the movie was filmed when he was probably 26 so there wasn’t that significant of an age difference even though that seems to be all anyone can focus on. Sure, a 23-year-old playing a high schooler has the advantage of distance on a stage to sell the illusion. Film makes it a little harder to convince us Platt is playing someone a decade younger than himself but it certainly isn’t unheard of for adults to play teens. (Ahem, Grease anyone? Olivia Newton-John was 29 when she played high schooler Sandy, and we bought it.) But director Stephen Chbosky made the fatal error of shooting Platt’s opening number in some very extreme close-ups which reveal some very heavy, unnatural looking skin-tone makeup, or digital de-aging, or both, which ruins the whole illusion right from the start. But … as Evan integrates with the high school students (and Kaitlyn Dever is now 25, Colton Ryan is 26, Amandla Stenberg is 23, and Nik Dodani is the same age as Platt so none of them were teens when the movie was shot), Platt does sell the idea that he’s a very (very) awkward teenager. He certainly knows the part inside and out, and he’s got a stunning voice. So can we just look past the age and aim our critical eye at the performance? If there are complaints to be made, perhaps it’s the body language, portraying Evan’s angst with bad posture, slumping shoulders and weird hand gestures. Maybe what worked on stage to play to the people in the ‘cheap seats’ needed to be toned down for the intimacy of film. We won’t even talk about his hair because that seems to be another complaint (it’s his but it only really looks like a bad wig in that opening scene … perhaps they should have stuck with the show’s opening number instead of making the one they used the thing that set the tone for the rest of the film). All that being said, it’s a good performance not worthy of all the hate it’s been given. The rest of the cast is also good, with Stenberg being the main stand-out because everyone else is usually sharing the screen with Platt and he kind of overshadows everyone and everything else in the scene. Stenberg does a nice job here shining through the supernova that is Ben Platt.
I enjoyed the songs, but I could not tell you which ones were from the show and which were new to the movie, so perhaps that’s a good thing that original songwriters Benj Pasek and Justin Paul were able to seamlessly combine both. My only gripe there is that the orchestration sometimes fights with the vocals for supremacy. The direction is fine, but Chbosky should have been more thoughtful in how he shot Platt, and the editing sometimes is a bit too ‘music video’ at times. There is one powerful scene where hundred of different people are talking and singing about how they’ve been affected (unknowingly by a lie) to tell their own truths about battles with depression, but it gets wrecked a bit by a cheesy moment when all of these videos coalesce into a photo of Connor. That was a bit cheesy. So, yeah, the movie has its issues but I think the thing that is important about the film, and the story, is for people who maybe are in Connor’s shoes, battling depression and other issues, that they are not alone. Help, in a lot of cases, is just a click away. If nothing else, that’s the one thing Dear Evan Hansen gets right.
So, if you’re a fan of the stage show … I can’t say one way or another if you’re going to enjoy the movie. They, apparently, are two different animals with the same basic story. I went in with the lowest of expectations and I came away not hating it, not being disappointed that I spent over two hours watching it. I liked the songs, I liked the performances, and I liked the overall message about help and hope. Until I do see the show, those are the only merits on which I can form my opinion.
Want to see Dear Evan Hansen and judge for yourself? Click on the image below to see the movie, and be sure to come back and tell us what you thought!
Dear Evan Hansen has a run time of 2 hours 17 minutes and is rated PG-13 for thematic material involving suicide, brief strong language and some suggestive references.
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