Formula: The Perks of Being a Wallflower / World’s Best Dad
There are few better hooks than Dear Evan Hansen’s. Evan is a social outcast, mainly due to crippling anxiety and depression. He writes a letter to himself as a therapy tool. Another reject at his high school, Connor, ends up with it and happens to still have it when he kills himself later that day. As a result, people think Evan was Connor’s only friend. Evan is then torn between maintaining the illusion that Connor’s family has hung everything on, which happens to also give Evan attention he’s always craved, or telling the truth, hurting Connor’s family, and going back to being a nobody. It’s a sweaty premise to set up, but it is a dagger emotionally. I get why the show became a hit and why they decided to make it a movie. And getting Stephen Chbosky to direct after great similar work with The Perks of Being a Wallflower and Wonder is the smartest choice I could come up with.
I’ve seen a stage production of Dear Evan Hansen and I don’t like it very much. I have no patience for stories built on two humans not having a proper conversation with each other. Stories built on stacked lies tend to rot everything else about the project. The writers take shortcuts in the story. The directors and editors have to cut the movie/show around obvious hurdles. The actors spend much of the performance explaining away natural impulses. My experience watching the show (and seeing the movie) was being fully clenched for two hours without the payoff to justify it.
Needless to say, I didn’t go into this movie with the highest of expectations. That said, there are things I quite like about the show. The music is good. I love the message. It normalizes anxiety, depression, and the need to ask for help. It discusses the different ways people handle it or cope with it. Cutting this dark story with songs, even if the songs are some of the most tear-jerking moments, offers an occasional release that makes it not unbearably sad from beginning to end.
People have had knives out for this movie for a while. Most of it has centered around Ben Platt reprising his role as Evan Hansen. It’s true that the now 28-year-old Platt looks too old to be in high school. I’ve enjoyed people passing around the 30 Rock gif of Steve Buscemi pretending to be in high school as a comparison. I think what’s lost in that gif is that, in addition to being obviously too old, Buscemi is performatively dressed to look like a high schooler. And that’s really my issue with Platt still playing the role. Sure, he looks a little too old. Then again, look at the rest of the cast. Amandla Stenberg is 22. Kaitlyn Dever is 24. Colton Ryan is 26. Nik Dodani also turns 28 this year. Look at any high school movie and I can find someone who is obviously too old. I love Superbad, but in no world does Jonah Hill pass for a high schooler. No, the problem with Platt as Evan Hansen is more about him still playing Evan Hansen for the stage in the movie. There shouldn’t be an “Evan Hansen look” for a movie. He doesn’t have to be so performative about his discomfort and anxiety. There are much smaller ways to play the same things that everyone else in the cast, not burdened by memories of playing the role on stage, choose to do.
Also, Dear Evan Hansen is the wrong kind of musical to bring to film. The point of a film musical adaptation is to feel the scope even more. Comedies can play big and broad. The dramas and romances that come to screen have a grandeur to them. They aren’t in the real world, but they are in a world they make real. Dear Evan Hansen is a pretty small and grounded story. The songs are there as cries to be heard. On film that plays a lot differently. As I mention with Platt’s performance, being smaller works better for the dramatic beats. More importantly, the music gets in the way of how convincing the story is. When Evan meets with Connor’s family for the first time and makes up the story about the orchard that they hung out at, it breaks into song right as he starts the lie. I know the song is there to express the moment emotionally, but in a movie about a big lie, the thing that’s supposed to convince the audience that the family believes the lie is how convincing the performance is. When that’s all done as a song, it’s like a cheat. “Here’s a song. Assume he was convincing because it’s a nice song.” Or, later in the movie, when Evan is giving the speech at Connor’s memorial. That speech turns into him singing “You Will Be Found”. That goes viral, but I heard the speech as a song. The song is really good. I could see the song going viral, but could I imagine that song as a speech going viral? I kind of want to see the monologue version of that scene instead. That could be an amazing scene. Time and time again, just as the acting is about to begin, it’s a song instead. This works really well on a stage. The artifice is right there since it’s a stage. In a movie, it actually gets in the way of the emotion, because this real moment turns into a weird fantasy moment.
Given how much the story of the movie annoys me, I liked this movie better than I thought I would. The supporting cast is quite strong. In the little that Colton Ryan is in the film before his character kills himself, he hints at more complexity than is on the page. Kaitlyn Dever as Connor’s sister and Amandla Stenberg as the class president who takes up using Connor’s memory to get help for others both give really human performances. They aren’t playing to the back rows. Amy Adams plays Connor’s mom with enough desperation that you can believe why she would invest in Evan’s stories so much. Like in the show, as Evan’s mom, Julianne Moore doesn’t come into the movie strong until late, when it feels like it has passed her by. She’s good but it’s so late. Few people are as good with stories of isolation as Chbosky. While his direction isn’t clinical, he brings what the movie needs. And the film does attempt to address a major issue I have with the show. It tries to develop Connor as a character after the fact. That’s the icky thing about the story. Connor gets lost in all of it. The film does better by him, although he’s still very abstract. For a movie/show all about how someone cares and we’re not really alone, ironically, Connor remains a mystery – almost a villain, even. The amount that I did enjoy the movie is an accomplishment, even though it falls way short of being particularly good.
Verdict: Weakly Don’t Recommend
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