Dear Evan Hansen (2021)

Score: 3 / 5

One of the most troubling musicals ever produced -- after, what, maybe Carousel? -- Dear Evan Hansen has finally made it to the silver screen. As such, it's finally reaching a much wider audience than simply those of us who had listened to the soundtrack for the last four years or so. Of course, with each new project by composers Benj Pasek and Justin Paul (The Greatest Showman, La La Land, Aladdin), their fanbase has grown. But seeing the famed musical from top to bottom reveals that it's distinctly darker than their other works, and its story by Steven Levenson (Fosse/Verdon, the upcoming tick, tick...Boom!) is really, truly problematic. And not simply in the "that didn't age well" kind of cynically postmodern way; it grapples with intense and urgent issues before coming to a conclusion that, well, feels deeply unsatisfying. As the ending attempts to assuage any complicit guilt from the audience it also bravely faces the consequences of its own plot points. One has to wonder if the full presentation in such an accessible medium has influenced its less than warm critical and popular reception.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves. In case you didn't already know, the film starts by introducing us to the title character, Evan, who is about to head off to school despite his debilitating social anxiety. We learn immediately that his mother, working a lot to support the two of them, is struggling to connect with Evan, but exhorts him to follow his therapist's advice and write letters to himself with attainable goals and words of encouragement. He wears a cast on his left arm, broken after falling from a tree in flashbacks presented to us ad nauseam during the film, although it's not until very late that -- SPOILER ALERT -- we learn that particular episode was in fact a suicide attempt brought on by Evan's equally debilitating depression. That revelation is the final emotional climax in a movie filled with similar twists of the knife. In case you weren't getting the idea, this is not a razzle-dazzle romp through high school.

In fact, and this is where I take some issue with Stephen Chbosky's adaptation of the musical, the film seems almost intent on making everything really fucking depressing for us as well as for the characters. With the exceptions of the opening number ("Waving Through a Window," one of the best songs in musical theatre in the last decade) and the letter-writing number ("Sincerely Me"), every song is despondent and sentimental, sickly both in emotional weight and in tempo. My indignation was piqued in the first few minutes because, even though "Waving" is a great opening number, the film cuts one of my favorite -- and notably upbeat -- songs entirely: "Anybody Have a Map," sung by the two mother characters. Similarly, nearer the climax, the film cuts "Good for You," a biting -- and also upbeat -- number that propels three distinct character choices in the stage musical.

Instead of including these numbers to help the momentum of the film, Chbosky just slices them in favor of lengthy dialogue scenes that feel, if possible, more morose and melodramatic than the songs. Even the two new musical inclusions, "The Anonymous Ones" (co-written with Amandla Stenberg, the actress who sings it) and "A Little Closer" are really slow and sad, far more about internalized character study than externalized character (or plot) development. Sacrificing story is just not a great model for any musical, especially one that has a lot of story to tell. The languid pace does more than just make the movie a bit of a sluggish experience: because each song is designed to pull at your tear ducts, I spent far too much of this overlong movie crying silently into my facemask. But, by the end of it, I felt less like I had experienced catharsis and more like I had been emotionally gaslighted.

And that's because -- as you might have gleaned from my first paragraph -- the screenplay is really, really weird. It forces us almost immediately to identify and empathize with Evan, through what we see as his weaknesses or flaws or relatability. Then we learn that he's not actually a great kid, and that his impulses are troubling; though it's clear he gets guilted or otherwise awkwardly shoehorned into making some of his bad decisions, the lies flow a little too freely. It's not a simple "yes" when the truth is "no," it's elaborate yarn-spinning, fable-fabricating, and it happens more than once. Soon enough, as a local tragedy spins into a spectacle -- and we really do have to question the overly dramatic response of the other school kids and townsfolk, who apparently never reached out to help before the tragedy -- Evan, caught in his lies, adeptly navigates tumultuous emotions for incredibly selfish personal gain. The tragedy, in which a relative stranger to Evan named Connor kills himself, leads Evan into Connor's family's home and hearts, until he finally lays claim to Connor's sister Zoe, a girl for whom he has been pining in silence.

The performances of the cast are uniformly excellent -- despite the screenplay's attempted hamstringing of the mothers, Amy Adams and Julianne Moore, who both steal their scenes -- and Ben Platt's awkward teenager persona, brilliantly translated from stage to screen, belies his breathtakingly angelic voice. What's interesting, though, is that on the surface, atop his layers of transformative makeup, he's actually quite grotesque. In a movie filled with profoundly flawed, human characters that could just as easily step into a scene from This is Us, Evan is so calculated and caricatured on a purely visual level, and so accomplished vocally, that he feels like he's from a totally different world. Moreover, Evan's devious methodology reveals him to be what we might loosely consider an antihero; we want him to succeed even as he fully deserves any comeuppance heading his way. Evan plays along with the public charade, gaining fame, family, and love he apparently always wanted and never got. All because a stranger, a high schooler, killed himself.

Honestly, if this same movie were presented to us in a different color scheme, let's say cooler and filled with greens or blues (the amber Hallmark-esque cinematography is unforgivably overwhelming), and if the score were occasionally in a minor key, it would probably feel like something akin to a thriller or black comedy. We'd recognize Evan for the troubled and troubling character he is, and fewer tears would fall as we inched closer to the end of our seats, waiting for him to snap. To be fair, Evan isn't the only heebie-jeebies-inducing person on screen; the film's climax begins when his friend Alanna (Stenberg), who has spearheaded the vigils and campaign to memorialize Connor, outright betrays Evan and publishes his most private letter to the world. Up to that point, she's easily the most decent person in town, and suddenly she destroys whatever sympathetic credibility she has. I mean, come on, who wrote this story, and why?

I'm going to have to do some looking for Levenson interviews to see exactly what the hell he was thinking when he wrote the book of this musical. I can only imagine the filmmakers here were trying to identify with young people struggling with mental health, but there is little direct attempt to honestly deal with those issues here. The depression and suicide elements have the opposite problem of !3 Reasons Why in that they are so vague as to be rendered almost irrelevant; the anxiety issues take center stage, and the characters do everything wrong regarding it. And the movie about emotional manipulation, itself structured manipulatively, can't quite wave through the window at us. It's beautiful and challenging and heartfelt, and those are great things. It'll make you cry, it'll make you cringe, and then it'll leave you reeling about what really happened to your heart. And that's just not my cuppa.