Everything you’ve heard is, unfortunately, true. “Dear Evan Hansen,” the film adaptation of the Grammy and six-time Tony award winning musical that took the world by storm when it premiered not that long ago in 2016, is quite terrible. Baffling so, in fact. It’s a bewildering film, one with what seemed like such an excellent cast and director at the helm and such ripe source material.
That right there is the perfect place to start. “Dear Evan Hansen,” as a concept, has always been fraught with controversy and criticism. For those unaware, the short version of the plot is that it follows Evan Hansen, an awkward teen struggling with mental illness, who’s letter to himself, an assignment from his therapist, is taken by a kid at his school who then takes his own life. His parents find Evan’s letter on his person and believe Evan and him to have been best friends and Evan lies to them, saying that they were best friends.
It is a lot to take in, and under lesser hands the emotional weight of the film would cause it to buckle almost immediately. You would think then, that director Stephen Chbosky (“The Perks of Being a Wallflower,” “Wonder”) who previously directed two films wrought with difficult emotional subject material and even wrote the original “Perks” novel would be the perfect choice to helm a film dealing with these topics.
Instead, he seems to botch the execution at nearly every turn. The resulting film has a bizarre tone that somehow plays its emotions far too big and yet also goes for such a toned down realism that it makes the inherent fantastical nature of the musical genre seem to painfully awkward. Despite its many flaws, 2019’s “Cats” had songs that played over grand sets and across multiple locations in a span of minutes. “Dear Evan Hansen” is a showcase of the exact opposite; a second act emotional moment has Evan awkwardly singing and crying while standing in a dining room, not moving for almost 4 minutes.
Casting is a place where the film seems to neither succeed nor inherently fail. Ben Platt (“Pitch Perfect,” The Politician”) has received more than his fair share of criticism for appearing far to old to play the film version of the character her originated on Broadway, and while he can still sing, he never tones his emotions down for the screen. Broadway doesn’t have the ability to close in on someone’s face like film can, so an actor naturally has to act bigger to communicate to the entire theater. Platt knows how to do that, yet never tones his performance down to compensate for when the camera is 3 inches from his face instead of yards away.
Amy Adams (“Enchanted,” “Arrival”) and Julianna Moore (“Boogie Nights,” “Still Alice”) deserve sainthood for their performances as they are clearly trying to do the best they can with the terrible screenplay they’ve been given. Adams acts the crap out of a role that has her doing little more than sitting around and looking sad about her dead son, and Moore’s character is almost borderline absent from both the film and her son, Evan’s, life. Its baffling that she says “I didn’t know you were hurting” in the third act to a son she reminded earlier in the film to go to his therapist appointments and take his medication.
The rest of the cast is servicable at best and forgettable at worst. Kaitlyn Dever (“Booksmart,” “Unbelievable”), Nik Dodani (“Escape Room,” “Atypical”), and Danny Pino (“Mayans M.C.,” “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit”) are all perfectly fine, nothing bad but nothing that stands out or makes the best of the bad material. Amandla Stenberg (“The Hate U Give,” “The Hunger Games”) meanwhile feels grossly miscast as Alana Beck, student leader who seeks Evan’s help to establish a charity in Connor’s name after his death. While the character is meant to be a leader who’s also soft spoken, Stenberg plays her with such a closed off and hushed whisper of a voice, its like watching an actor being held hostage.
Without a doubt, the film’s biggest and most glaring flaw is its overall script. Yes, the moment to moment dialogue can be painfully eye-roll inducing, but the overall plot has a massive and fundamental change compared to the original musical that effectively kneecaps the film from the very start. Steven Levenson (“Masters of Sex,” “Fosse/Verdon”), who also wrote the book for the musical, has cut out four songs from the latter half of the film. This sort of decision wouldn’t normally be an issue, these sorts of things happen all the time with adaptation, however its the songs in question that are the issue.
Its hard to say who’s decision exactly this was, but the four songs cut are ones that make a definitive statement on Evan and his decision. They show his best friend arguing with him and forming a definitive stance on how what he’s done is horrible, there’s a similar song with his mother as well, and they basically serve as the thesis statement for the material, showing that yes, despite being the main character and growing from this experience, you should not think Evan is a “good person” at all. The confrontational scene and song wherein Evan’s best friend chews him out and effectively ends their friendship over his selfish decision is gone. In its place, Evan’s friend looks at a social media post Evan made on his phone and stares into the middle distance, sighing a sad sigh.
The fact that the film has cut these moments make it feel wildly awkward and inappropriate. Frankly, it reduces the story to one wherein a teenager lies about knowing a dead kid, lies to his family, tells the truth, tries to get to know the kid on a surface level, and the sits back and says “well, I sure learned my lesson” and smiles at the blue sky. It’s, frankly, disgusting.
This hasn’t even touched on the myriad of small technical issues. The cinematography is far too zoomed in most of the time, the film’s pacing is absolutely glacial, lacking any kind of lightness the musical genre should inherently have, and the entire film is shot with such a bizarrely gray color palette that it borders on just being black and white.
“Dear Evan Hansen” is a perfect storm of terrible film making. So often we get films that are bad from a storytelling perspective and fine from a technical one and vice versa. This is both at once, colliding with such violent apathy that it becomes baffling. If you’re not familiar with the material, you’re jaw will likely constantly hit the floor as the plot continues to become more inane and bizarre. If you are familiar with the material, the only reason you should see this film is to watch the unknowings’ jaws hit the floor. Its as if the kid who still thinks Romeo and Juliet is a love story made a Romeo and Juliet movie. Watching is only advisable with copious alcohol and friends to riff back and forth with. “Dear Evan Hansen” is the rare career low for literally everyone involved, a cacophonous of boring directorial decisions and poor adaptation decisions, a film fueled by nepotism and bad ideas. 1/5
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