Mark Reviews Movies: DEAR EVAN HANSEN

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 23, 2021

There are moments when little pieces of honesty emerge from Dear Evan Hansen. They seem almost miraculous, considering how disingenuous most of this movie feels.

The setup is one miscalculation, but the tone with which director Stephen Chbosky and screenwriter Steven Levenson approach the material is an even bigger one. The story, based on the stage musical written by Levenson (with composers/lyricists Benj Pasek and Justin Paul), is about anxiety, depression, and suicide, and yes, you correctly read that description of the source material.

This isn't just a story about anxiety, depression, and suicide. It's a musical about anxiety, depression, and suicide. At a certain point, one has to wonder what Levenson and company were thinking, in making topics so severe into something so intrinsically artificial.

For his part, Chbosky does at least attempt to play the story with as much straightforward realism as possible. There's only one number that could be called a song-and-dance routine, and it's an amusing fantasy sequence. In it, our protagonist imagines what a friendship with a fellow high school student, who recently committed suicide, would have been like. He's imagining it, by the way, so that he can fake a series of emails to show to the dead teenager's parents, hoping that they'll believe he was actually a friend to their dead son.

The mind reels at the premise, then at the realization a lot of this will be put into song, then at the utter sincerity with which the filmmakers approach it, and then at the flippant fantasy sequence. All of this, somehow, only occurs within the first 30 minutes or so of the movie. Many bad decisions, also somehow, follow.

The teen manufacturing the emails, so that he can fake a friendship with the recently dead student, is Evan Hansen, who's played by Ben Platt, in a performance of such distractingly mannered physicality that one is almost diverted from the fact that Platt clearly isn't a teenager. The actor originated the role on stage, so one understands the notion of him continuing the part on screen. Well, one could understand it, if the movie had been made several years ago or if the co-stars, supporting characters, and extras didn't actually look as if they belonged in the halls of high school. It wasn't, and those other actors do. Here we are, one supposes.

Evan suffers from anxiety and depression, as well as a broken arm from falling out of a tree over the summer, and dreads returning to school. His mother Heidi (Julianne Moore) works long hours as a nurse. He has a crush on Zoe (Kaitlyn Dever), who's the sister of the outcast Connor (Colton Ryan).

Meanwhile, Evan's therapist has suggested he write a pep-talk letter, addressed to himself, every day. After a lonely first day back at school, Evan's most recent letter isn't optimistic.

Connor ends up with the note (Don't ask how or why), and sometime later, he commits suicide. The teen's parents—mother Cynthia (Amy Adams) and stepfather Larry (Danny Pino)—assume the letter is their troubled son's suicide note. Since it was addressed to Evan, he must have been their kid's best friend. Evan doesn't fess up, for an assortment of reasons that ultimately lead to the movie using suicide as a different but equally discomforting plot point.

The whole of the plot—from Evan's lie, to the popularity he eventually gains from being friends with Connor, to his queasy attempts to flirt with Zoe by transferring his feelings for her upon her dead brother—is so dark, so weird, and, occasionally, so creepy that Levenson and Chbosky's attempts at earnestness come across as false and empty. Evan's mental health issues, which are meant to rationalize and excuse everything he does, end up feeling exploited and exploitative, because they're mainly a rationalization and an excuse to make the plot continue, while keeping the character relatively free of any actual blame.

Some of this, admittedly, works, in spite of the general failure. Dever's performance might be the only one that gives us a sense of an actual person beneath it all. Amandla Stenberg, who plays the school's overachiever with mental health issues she keeps secret, leads a song that shows Even wasn't as alone as he might have thought on that first day of school. As soon as the real reason for Evan's charade becomes apparent, the movie can finally address the feelings of anxiety and depression in tangible, comprehensible terms.

Maybe the artificiality of the stage helped to sell this. Whatever the case, as a movie, Dear Evan Hansen is a misguided, phony affair.

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