I knew less than nothing about Dear Evan Hansen prior to viewing director Stephen Chbosky’s screen adaptation. I say less than because up until a few months ago, I was under the misapprehension the beloved Broadway musical was something of a coming out story, with its title character a troubled gay teen (probably) secretly in love with his best friend. Perhaps I conflated the initial press surrounding the stage production’s breakout-star Ben Platt – who is, in fact, an out gay man – with the character he originated and undoubtedly made his own. It appears I also imputed a bit of Love, Simon into the mix. In any event, when the first trailer for the film dropped earlier this summer and (for better or worse) lit up the internet, I was disabused of all misguided notions. Still, I was unprepared for this preposterous spectacle, whose central storyline is predicated on misdirection. Thanks to my self-imposed ignorance, I related to and suffered with every character in Dear Evan Hansen, all of whom were duped by that dear, Evan Hansen.
Look: I’m in no position to evaluate how successful a stage-to-screen adaptation this is of the Broadway phenomenon. Dear Evan Hansen garnered six Tony wins, including Best Musical, and even picked up a Grammy and Emmy along the way. People clearly adore the show. As a neophyte, these accolades seem baffling, having suffered through an overtly treacly, emotionally mendacious, too-long movie musical. Granted, something essential may have been lost in translation. But the problem here isn’t the fundamental difference between the thrill of live theater and a 2-D cinematic experience. According to some internet sleuthing, tweaks have only been made at the margins. The bones of Dear Evan Hansen’s source material – the stage show’s original themes, plot twists, characters arcs, soaring numbers – remain firmly in place.
Boiled down to its essence Dear Evan Hansen is, in either format, a story about a lonely teenager who first stumbles into adoptive familial love, and then into Instagram stardom. How he gets there is somewhat circuitous and ultimately gross. Evan (Platt, reprising the role) suffers from deep social anxiety. When we first meet him, his broken arm is in a plaster cast conspicuously absent of permanent-marker signatures (in other words, a social outcast). Following a random computer-lab dustup, and some Shakespearean plot somersaults, Evan becomes ensnared with a fellow pariah named Connor (Colton Ryan) after the latter commits suicide.
With the help of a family friend (Nik Dodani), our fabulist hero engineers a falsehood that spirals out of control. Soon, Evan establishes deep ties with Connor’s mother (Amy Adams), stepfather (Danny Pino), and sister (Kaitlyn Dever) (whom he also has a crush on). Deceits pile atop of more deceits, before the entire high school and large swaths of social media are captivated by a fabrication that has metastasized beyond repair. A Big Lie has been perpetuated, then downplayed with feel-good power ballads (by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul), and finally glossed over by a pat, semi-reckoning. (The original book and adapted screenplay are by Steven Levenson.) This breezy relationship between active dishonesty and little-to-no consequence, executed with swooning sentimentality, is the last thing we need in our post-truth cultural climate.
Little of this would matter as much if Dear Evan Hansen were an excellent, or merely watchable, delivery method for its pretty good songs. Which brings us to Ben Platt, who (still quite young at 27, mind you) is now just a shade too old to play a convincing teenager. Like a chord struck slightly off-key, the casting choice is distracting, if not disorienting. The hair, makeup, and costuming decisions meant to de-age Platt approach intentional, 21 Jump Street-style parody. His bizarre physical presence, particularly when in the same frame with actual teenagers, swallows whatever’s happening in a scene. And despite Platt’s impressive vocal instrument, his low-register spoken intonations, coupled with awkward body tics, only invite comparisons to Fred Armisen vamping in a random Portlandia sketch. Dear Evan Hansen may have its heart in the right place. Its head, however, is nowhere to be found.
Photo courtesy of Universal Pictures
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