Dear Evan Hansen
Bruce Steele: When you and I discussed Dear Evan Hansen after a performance at the Peace Center, you said you might be "the wrong age demographic" for the show. Now that the smash-hit Broadway musical is a star-studded film, do you still feel emotionally detached?
Edwin Arnaudin: I think I was just being kind while trying to rationalize why I didn’t see the greatness in the Tony-winning stage show that folks in surrounding generations hailed as a masterpiece. With the movie version, I hoped director Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower) and his collaborators might take advantage of the immense potential of the big screen and inject the severely flawed story with some cinematic magic — not necessarily creating an In the Heights-type spectacle, but at least offering something creative. Boy, was I wrong.
Bruce: Wow. We clearly had completely different experiences of the film. I was moved and impressed, and thought Chbosky zoomed in nicely on the characters — not just Evan (Ben Platt), who's a lonely, cripplingly anxious high school senior, but also those around him. The star casting of Julianne Moore as Heidi, Evan's single mom, and Amy Adams as Cynthia, the privileged mother of Evan's classmate Connor (Colton Ryan), played into that more cinematic approach. The chief sticking point for you seems to be the plot, which has Evan going from zero to hero at his high school when he's mistaken for the best friend of Connor, who has committed suicide — an error he magnifies and, for a while, enjoys. I found it no less plausible than any other stylized high school movie, whether Ferris Bueller's Day Off or Booksmart. But it seems to irk you.
Edwin: Even with the possibility that grieving parents would latch onto a nugget of hope suggesting that their son wasn’t the monster they and everyone else saw, the lengths to which Dear Evan Hansen stretches its hero’s lie is ludicrous. There’s no way an entire community would be this gullible and the overlong wait for Evan’s inevitable comeuppance is especially grueling in film form. The convenience of Heidi working all the time and therefore unable to give these rubes a reality check likewise rings extra false here, plus Zoe (Kaitlyn Dever), Connor’s sister and Evan’s crush, appears to see through the ruse from its inception, yet bizarrely goes along with it, too.
Bruce: Again, I concede the implausibility but defend a musical's right to construct its world apart from reality, as long as the storytellers have a coherent vision. I think play-and-screen scribe Steven Levenson, director Chbosky, and the songwriters, Benj Pasek and Justin Paul (La La Land), know what they're doing, which is personifying adolescent vulnerabilities — and that includes Zoe's willingness to believe something she has good reason to doubt. Heidi credibly stands in for every loving mom who thinks she's doing her best but misses a lot of red flags. But I gather the film didn't work for you on some very basic levels.
Edwin: The flat filmmaking and lack of memorable songs (save for the boisterous "Sincerely, Me”) grind the pace to a crawl, but the biggest problem is the attempted de-aging of 28-year-old star Platt, which is unsuccessful and downright creepy. Instead of seeing a plausible teen, I kept thinking I was witnessing Fred Armisen onscreen.
Bruce: The filmmaking isn't flashy, but I found it lively enough, and for me the songs worked better on screen than on stage, as musical soliloquies that are movingly delivered and often segue smoothly in and out of dialogue. How can you not be moved by "Waving Through a Window" or "You Will Be Found"? Which is why I was won over by the casting of Platt, recreating the stage role that earned him a Tony. He's twitchy and vulnerable and vocally powerful, and I was moved and mesmerized by his performance. Yes, he's in his 20s, but I grant Dear Evan Hansen the Glee exception for overage actors playing high schoolers — a movie tradition stretching back at least into the 1950s.
Edwin: Platt’s portrayal of teenage awkwardness consists of a slumped posture and bad hair — he's barely trying. And while characters bursting into song works just fine in the heightened reality of the stage, it’s far less successful on screen in this reality-grounded milieu, blurring lines to the point that it's often unclear if non-singing characters are hearing the vocalists’ words as sung solos or straightforward speech. Without La La Land's Justin Hurwitz around to support their lyrics, Pasek and Paul struggle mightily, as they did with The Greatest Showman.
Bruce: Were there any of the performers that you liked here?
Edwin: Devers and Adams are passable, but Moore feels miscast and strangely sidelined in a role that won Rachel Bay Jones a Tony. Amandla Stenberg has a few charming moments as secretly-struggling student body president Alana Beck, but Nik Dodani’s interpretation of Evan’s sorta-friend Jared Kalwani lacks the humor that Jared Goldsmith brought to the Peace Center show. It’s a lifeless adaptation, and if the musical’s creative team was so adamant about bringing the material to the screen with Platt, they should have done a filmed performance like the vastly superior Hamilton and Come From Away, the latter of which feels increasingly robbed of the Best Musical Tony that went to Dear Evan Hansen.
Bruce: Dear Evan Hansen was a cultural phenomenon onstage, which won it the Tony. (I probably would have voted for Come From Away, but only by a slim margin.) I doubt that that success can be repeated with a film, but I'm happy to have it out there for those who can't see a Broadway-quality stage production. The Platt casting will always be polarizing — amplified by the fact that his dad, mega-producer Mark Platt (Mary Poppins Returns), was the lead producer here — but it was a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" choice for the filmmakers, and I support their decision to stick with the role's originator. Obviously we don't see eye to eye on his performance, but I'm happy to be in the "good cop" chair at least this once. I give the film an B-plus.
Edwin: I’m not sure any actor would have succeeded as Evan under Chbosky’s direction and with Levenson wholly uninterested in tweaking his book to work as a movie. The creative team is so confident in the power of their original product that they exert minimal effort in putting it on screen, resulting in the worst kind of fan service that’s highly unlikely to win over viewers new to the material. As with the stage musical, important issues regarding teen suicide and depression are raised, but not to a meaningful extent, and the incorporation of social media is even more awkward here. It all somewhat worked in its original form, but fails miserably as a film and gets a D from me.
Overall grade: C. Now playing at the AMC River Hills, Carolina Cinemark, and Regal Biltmore Grande.
(Photo: Erica Doss/Universal Pictures)
