“Dear Evan Hansen…”
It’s the first words uttered out of the film’s titular character, played by Ben Platt, as he begins a daily self-addressed letter as assigned by his therapist. When one of these letters is unrelatedly found in the pocket of a classmate who commits suicide, Evan is misinterpreted for being the secret best friend of Connor Murphy (Colton Ryan) by Connor’s parents Cynthia and Larry (Amy Adams and Danny Pino), who are desperate to understand the end of their son’s life. The cast on Evan’s arm also bears the name “CONNOR,” but the cause for his signature was much closer to an act of bullying than any display of affection. Evan hesitantly goes along with the mistake at first, but begins to actively contribute to the ever-evolving lie by creating fake email exchanges between himself and Connor and inventing shared stories of their friendship, all bringing him closer to the Murphy family while gaining viral popularity as a martyr of mental illness awareness.
What sounds like the premise of a 1930s screwball comedy is played here with complete sincerity, regardless of the cringed laughter that each extension of the lie elicits in the audience. The morality of the situation is very black and white, yet we continue to watch as Evan digs himself deeper and deeper into a hole for his own personal benefit. Evan struggles with mental illness, having multiple forms of anxiety and depression for which he is medicated. He also lives alone with his mother Heidi (Julianne Moore), who is often absent due to working overnight shifts. As Evan becomes more of a pseudo family member of the Murphy’s, he finds a functional and financially-stable family that gives him the attention that he feels he is otherwise lacking. It doesn’t hurt that Even’s longtime crush is Connor’s sister Zoe (Kaitlyn Dever), and getting closer to the family means getting closer to the girl that Evan was otherwise too nervous to speak to. In these ways, the film is doing all it possibly can to make us sympathize with Evan’s perspective so we may understand the reason he continues to live in his lie.
However, the flaw is that Evan’s character is so unlikable as he proves to be capable of escalating his deception and rarely considering perspectives outside of his own. The screenplay works hard in its first few minutes to tell us that people think Evan is a loser with a difficult home life, but it fails to make us feel those things for ourselves. Perhaps we could be on Evan’s side if we truly believed that the Murphys absolutely need Evan to be this vessel to understanding their son and that Evan’s mistake comes from a place of what an anxious teenager thinks is doing good. Either way, it feels irresponsible to treat this premise so facetiously while also trying to say something profound about the nature of mental illness and those struggling with it. Where the story eventually lands feels inevitable, but it’s hard to say whether forgiveness is capable of curving the damage done.
On paper, director Stephen Chbosky seems like a great choice to helm the screen version of this story. His film adaptation of his own novel, The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012), and his work on R. J. Palacio’s Wonder (2017) are two of the most lauded coming-of-age films of the last decade, each also featuring nuanced depictions of mental illness. Chbosky even has some experience working on musicals as a co-screenwriter of the film adaptation of the musical Rent (2005) and on the live-action remake of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast (2017). Therefore, it comes as a bit of a surprise that so many of Dear Evan Hansen’s musical moments feel so lifeless and visually uninspired.
A story on stage requires a different sort of suspension of disbelief than a film, and a musical is even harder to make work in this medium that, oftentimes, aims for a sense of realism. When a character begins to sing on screen, the filmmaking needs to somehow shift to tell us that we are experiencing something that is heightened, or at least angled away, from the way we behave every day. The empty space that begins a story on stage is usually enough for us to accept whatever we’re presented with. But in film, our expectations are different because the strengths of the medium are different. There needs to be a musical world that is consistent throughout and pressing enough to justify its existence. This becomes a challenge for a story like Dear Evan Hansen, one that is attempting to be both grounded in reality and in the fantastical world of a musical where its characters sing to one another. On stage, we buy that the musical world is a way for the socially restrained Evan to not only find a way of conveying his inner life, but also an expressiveness that is far beyond what we might consider natural behavior. But in the film, this musical world feels arbitrary and lyrically verbose; the rules of song are often unclear as to whose perspective the camera is trying to capture. We spend so much time in reverse shots that it seems as if Dear Evan Hansen is afraid of being a musical because it doesn’t know how to visually communicate through song. If it wasn’t well known that the source material is a musical, one might wonder why these characters have any dramatic reason to be singing at all.
A few musical sequences in the film work better than others. “Sincerely Me” features Evan writing fictional letters to himself from Connor in order to further fabricate the history of their made-up relationship. Not only does the song have the most creative staging and feel the most alive, it works because it uses film techniques to “edit” moments of fantasy as Evan edits a letter depicting them. A shared ballad between the Murphy family, “Requiem” is also a nice sequence, as it’s sparked from a moment where Zoe is already expressing herself through an instrument. Cross-cutting between the individual grieving family members evolves into a series of dissolves that unites them visually and musically, despite them each having this moment in solitude. These are two fairly simple and quick sequences, yet they give a much-needed reminder of the potential of cinematic musicals in a film that does not otherwise have much inventiveness to offer the form. There’s only so many times an audience will tolerate cutting to the same shaky cam flashback of Evan running through the woods or each character having a verse of their song as they amble down the school hallway, classmates remaining blissfully unaware of the musical happening around them.
As its title suggests, Dear Evan Hansen is a star vehicle, and much of the success of this film comes down to whether or not Ben Platt’s performance works for the audience. His age has already been a widely discussed topic of internet conversation (it doesn’t help that the hundreds of background actors around him actually look like teenagers), but putting that blatant casting fault aside, it doesn’t feel like Platt’s made a proper adjustment from stage to screen for this character that he’s known for over five years and won a Best Actor Tony Award for playing. What might read as someone with social anxieties onstage has an increased severity onscreen when Platt approaches his physicality with the same intensity. However, even though Platt’s performance remains distracting throughout, many around him do a solid job with what their characters are given. Julianne Moore has several standout scenes late in the film as Evan’s weathered, yet unwavering mother, and Kaitlyn Dever’s Zoe brings an understated sorrow to life in a way that nearly saves the film every time she’s onscreen. Even when the romantic chemistry between Platt and Dever feels off, her moments alone feel like some of the most authentic in the film. As polished a singer as Platt is, it’s Dever’s vocal performance that shines through her gentler approach and in the way she always sings authentically as her character.
The final act of Dear Evan Hansen pulls out all the stops to string together all of its through lines in order to generate a powerful emotional catharsis. Those final 30 minutes of ballads and teardrops will hit for those still onboard with the story and be excruciating for those who’ve bailed since the beginning; but for all its misguided morality and uninspired musicality, at least Dear Evan Hansen is consistent in its endeavor to make you emotional. Don’t blame yourself if you, like those caught in Evan’s web, also fall for the layers of manipulation.
