Dear Evan Hansen Review: Ben Platt Leads A Musical With A Rotten Core

In the weeks since the musical from stage to screen Dear Evan Hansen Released at the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival, the film has endured the exact kind of public derision that would make its main character’s palms water with anxiety. The instant criticism piñata inspired criticism and a barrage of social media posts in the tone of a high school cafeteria bunch, with a focus on the phrase “Wait, that is What is it about ?! “The premise and perspective of 27-year-old star Ben Platt continues to play the role he originated on Broadway, the bumbling high school student Evan Hansen.

As more people watched the movie, it became a kind of sport to see who could conjure up the most creative and evocative description of this strange man-boy. Alison Willmore from Vulture described “The casting of an OBVIOUSLY GROWN MAN WHO ONLY SHOULDERS SHOULDERS” as “an act of sabotage approaching the avant-garde”, and in a particularly lacerating tone Letterboxd input, Esther Rosenfield compared Platt’s body language to that of the rat-like vampire, Count Orlok from Nosferatu.

There are dozens of posts echoing variations on these sentiments, raising the question of how something that Hollywood gave the green light based on its widespread profitable popularity could have become such a high-profile laughingstock. (A report from The coat mentions that Universal’s top brass are “hurt and disappointed by the initial response” to the film). When a Broadway hit makes the leap to the screen, it’s because executives have decided the property is nice enough to grab an unusual audience. crowd going to the theater. Dear Evan Hansen revoked that presumption in a swift and brutal manner. But the fact is, this program, based on life affirmation, means a lot to a lot of people. The dissonance between its huge success on stage and the intense backlash it currently faces as a film has less to do with elements lost in translation and more to do with what the filmmakers found.

It is tempting to dismiss this disconnect as the product of a self-selected audience and suggest that Dear Evan Hansen He benefited from his initial audiences being the tormented 13-year-olds who could most identify with his story. (Just last year, HamiltonThe broadcast’s debut illustrated that when a show reaches a broader demographic, it immediately faces a broader range of criticism.) But that oversimplification about Dear Evan HansenPopularity does not take into account institutional sources of approval: The Broadway production won six Tonys, including Best Musical, and some critics from legacy publications. held up like a triumph. But other coverage complicated that narrative, with some writers now vindicated pointing out the fault lines in the emotional subtext of the musical. His problems were present from the beginning, but in the scenic incarnation of the story, they were easily ignored or forgiven. In their cinematic incarnation, they’ve outgrown launch and overshadowed everything else.

The truth is that there is moral rot at the center of Dear Evan Hansen, a story about how the suicide of one child gives another a reason to live. That’s the most generous writing possible of the jaw-dropping plot, in which the withdrawn Evan gets caught up in a lie about his made-up friendship with his late classmate Connor (Colton Ryan). The action starts off plausibly enough, as Evan passively allows Connor’s grieving parents (Amy Adams and Danny Pino) ​​to misinterpret a note found in their son’s pocket, then lets the confusion fade when he sees how happy it makes them. Before long, Evan ventures into dire territory, compiling a full story of good times with Connor, inadvertently sparking a national mental health awareness movement, and most reprehensibly of all, using his influence to strike up a tentative romance. with the dead boy’s sister, Zoe (Kaitlyn Dever).

Although Evan feels bad about his pathological borderline choices, consumed with guilt and panic once his mother (Julianne Moore) begins to uncover the truth, the script hardly reproaches him. After a few shots of disapproving looks, the family they lied to practically gets over him, and Evan breaks up with Zoe anyway. The script overlooks the fact that Evan Hansen turns out to be a real jerk. After painstakingly showing her vulnerable and sensitive side, the story takes the affection of the audience for granted. The lyrics, from songwriting duo Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, offer you comfort and redemption. “You will be found” explodes as the central mantra of the show, like an It Gets Better campaign, redesigned for depressed heterosexual youth.

For teens facing isolation or alienation, it is a powerful message by design, calculated for maximum catharsis. (That’s double for the young men in the band; Evan exposes the sensitive soul that hides from the world during musical numbers, capable of being his best and fullest self through his tremulous vibrato.) There’s more than a breath of manipulation to the show’s ruthless form. induces pathos, as if starting from the wave of tearful salvation and reverse engineering from there. It’s nearly two and a half hours of plateau at construction site, with the goal of ripping out viewers’ hearts with the self-pitying opener, “Waving Through the Window,” and maintaining that grip on each successive scene. The songs, operating on the unique stage of “soaring and hymn”, reveal the creators’ aspirations to create continuous sensations. With the exception of a lighthearted song in which Evan imagines himself performing Dance Dance Revolution with Connor, each track seeks an air of climactic climax. The effect is exhausting.

On stage, the audience can give the melodrama more freedom. It is a prerequisite for a medium in which people express themselves by spontaneously breaking into song. The theatrical setting sells heartbreaking stories on the merit of its intimacy and immediacy, two areas where live theater has the upper hand over the relative sobriety of cinema. The curious case of this show’s drastic change in fortunes can be attributed in large part to the formal transition from stage to screen, and the corresponding change in suspension of disbelief. Without the heady energy of a live cast just feet away, everything becomes too light for your own good, like being in a club when the lights come on. In the film, the basis for this story of cynical button-pressing is laid bare.

That is far from the only accentuated flaw in adaptation. For all its wild notions of human behavior, Broadway Dear Evan Hansen It was presented as a more ingrained kind of musical, a look at the real problems real children face. The film attempts to stick to this foundation through its lack of dance, glitz, and the grandeur of scale associated with Broadway. (It also shows in the music, which has more in common with polished-to-shine radio pop than good tunes.) , the middle-class houses of the anonymous city and the industrial-style school devoid of personality. But Pasek and Paul still need a boy’s temperamental teenage years to carry great narrative interests, and without the exuberance inherent in theater, the film has to communicate the desired intensity through strange alternative mediums.

Platt’s otherwise disastrous technically accomplished performance is starting to make more sense as an act of compensation. His venous, strangled delivery as he sings is the only way he can convey his inner turmoil, working against the wooden inertia of his posture and blockage. Director Stephen Chbosky (The perks of Being a Wallflower) also strives to create enough scale to fill the silver screen. At its cheesiest, it illustrates that Evan has gone viral by firing a flurry of smartphone video responses through a black void until they merge into an Instagram photo. As Evan searches for touches of beauty in the everyday monotony of his school (Chbosky’s aesthetic could justly be described as “the ‘before’ part of a commercial for mood-altering drugs”), the film becomes mired in banality. from which you are trying to escape.

It’s possible that an impending box office windfall will cast these slanders as the pointless objections of grumpy old men who are out of touch with the wishes of the mainstream audience. This is how things played out with Pasek and Paul’s also derided and still fabulously lucrative Hugh Jackman musical. The best showman. Although critics of that film accused it was a hollow story filled with a false sense of goodness (which is the closest this team of songwriters comes to an author’s label), that didn’t stop. “This is me” of taking a second life as a karaoke staple.

If the cinema is, as Roger Ebert stated, a machine that generates empathy, Dear Evan Hansen it is well oiled and runs at full capacity. Pasek and Paul take the famous Ebert metaphor to its breaking point, where it begins to sound more like a dislike than anything else. In doing the delicate work of courting compassion, that bloodless mechanical efficiency only leaves a person feeling drained and simply used.

Dear Evan Hansen is already in theaters.