Dear Evan Hansen
Year: 2021
Director: Stephen Chbosky
Starring: Amy Adams, Kaitlyn Dever, Julianne Moore, Ben Platt & Amandla Stenberg
Runtime: 137 mins
BBFC: 12
Published: 14/03/24
Director: Stephen Chbosky
Starring: Amy Adams, Kaitlyn Dever, Julianne Moore, Ben Platt & Amandla Stenberg
Runtime: 137 mins
BBFC: 12
Published: 14/03/24
I’d heard so many bad things about the 2021 film adaptation of Dear Evan Hansen. The award-winning musical had garnered a huge following on Broadway and the West End, and like most film adaptations of hit musicals this should have been an easy awards contender. Instead, the film adaptation of Dear Evans Hansen went down as one of the worst films of the year, and one of the worst major movie musical adaptations of all time. I avoided it for a while, but I hesitantly took the plunge into Dear Evans Hansen and whilst the experience was not as bad as I expected, there’s some really unforgivable problems with this film.
Evan Hansen (Ben Platt) suffers with crippling anxiety and has no friends. His therapist has advised that he write letters to himself to process his emotions. But when one of his peers, fellow loner and emotionally unstable Connor (Colton Ryan), kills himself and is found with one of Evan’s letters, Connor’s family mistake this as a suicide note to his one and only friend.
Unable to tell them the truth because of his anxiety, Evan helps Connor’s family process their grief by fabricating a friendship that never existed. But as the lie grows and becomes more complicated, and Connor’s sister Zoe (Kaitlyn Dever) begins to fall for Evan, his world begins to fall apart in front of his eyes.
Evan Hansen (Ben Platt) suffers with crippling anxiety and has no friends. His therapist has advised that he write letters to himself to process his emotions. But when one of his peers, fellow loner and emotionally unstable Connor (Colton Ryan), kills himself and is found with one of Evan’s letters, Connor’s family mistake this as a suicide note to his one and only friend.
Unable to tell them the truth because of his anxiety, Evan helps Connor’s family process their grief by fabricating a friendship that never existed. But as the lie grows and becomes more complicated, and Connor’s sister Zoe (Kaitlyn Dever) begins to fall for Evan, his world begins to fall apart in front of his eyes.
I want to start with the positives because whilst I’ve not seen the stage show, I honestly think this film had the potential to be great because the story is so good.
It’s a tough sell for sure, mentally unstable kid pretends to be friends with a classmate who just killed himself so he can get close to the dead kid’s sister. But the way Evans is written is just so beautiful, and you completely understand his good intentions behind what would normally be considered such a heinous act.
The portrayal of anxiety is also really great here. Evan can hardly function at the start of the film. He overthinks every single detail of his life to the point where he can’t have normal human interactions. But he finds his voice and his confidence to overcome his illness through fabricating this magical friendship, always putting the desires of Connor’s family first.
The romantic relationship he forms with Zoe feels natural too. Whilst Evan has a crush on Zoe at the start of the film, her feelings towards him grow from her own perception of him and not from him actively pursuing her. This makes one of the story’s more problematic elements more digestible because despite the lie about being Connor’s friend he’s just been himself towards her and it makes you root for them.
The cast deliver strong acting performances all round too, particularly Platt and Dever. I also loved Amy Adams as Connor’s mother, Cynthia.
But that’s really about where my praise for the film ends unfortunately. Whilst I’m still on the subject of cast, we have a Grease problem going on here in that basically all the school age characters are noticeably too old to play characters of that age. Whilst some actors it’s slightly less obvious than others, Platt in particular sticks out like a sore thumb. In a desperate attempt to make him look young they’ve just made him look ill and malnourished.
He is most certainly the Rizzo of this film, not the sole culprit of being too old for the role but certainly the most obvious.
It’s a tough sell for sure, mentally unstable kid pretends to be friends with a classmate who just killed himself so he can get close to the dead kid’s sister. But the way Evans is written is just so beautiful, and you completely understand his good intentions behind what would normally be considered such a heinous act.
The portrayal of anxiety is also really great here. Evan can hardly function at the start of the film. He overthinks every single detail of his life to the point where he can’t have normal human interactions. But he finds his voice and his confidence to overcome his illness through fabricating this magical friendship, always putting the desires of Connor’s family first.
The romantic relationship he forms with Zoe feels natural too. Whilst Evan has a crush on Zoe at the start of the film, her feelings towards him grow from her own perception of him and not from him actively pursuing her. This makes one of the story’s more problematic elements more digestible because despite the lie about being Connor’s friend he’s just been himself towards her and it makes you root for them.
The cast deliver strong acting performances all round too, particularly Platt and Dever. I also loved Amy Adams as Connor’s mother, Cynthia.
But that’s really about where my praise for the film ends unfortunately. Whilst I’m still on the subject of cast, we have a Grease problem going on here in that basically all the school age characters are noticeably too old to play characters of that age. Whilst some actors it’s slightly less obvious than others, Platt in particular sticks out like a sore thumb. In a desperate attempt to make him look young they’ve just made him look ill and malnourished.
He is most certainly the Rizzo of this film, not the sole culprit of being too old for the role but certainly the most obvious.
You may wonder why I specified acting performances and not performances in general, and this brings me to Dear Evan Hansen’s greatest problem. Why is this even a musical? This has to be a problem with the source material as well because the songs often don’t work, and honestly this would have been so much better had there been no songs in it at all. The quality of the musical numbers range from forgettably mediocre at best to laughably bad at their worst. The best song in the whole film was the opening number which explored the way in which Evan views the world from the perspective of a social outcast with severe anxiety, but the metrics which I’m using to rank it as the best is based on the rest being significantly worse.
The vocal performances don’t really hold up either. A lot of the tunes sound outside of Platt’s vocal range, as if he’s struggling to hit the higher notes. Everybody else kind of coasts through, we’re not talking Pierce Brosnan in Mamma Mia levels of bad here, but nobody shines in their musical numbers which makes them even more puzzling that they’re even there.
The stage show has quite a large fanbase but I just don’t see this story working as a musical at all. The actual tale it tells is excellent and I got really invested in the story and characters. But the songs are bad, plain and simple, and if you’ve chosen to present your story as a musical then the songs need to be as strong (or usually stronger) than the story you’re trying to tell. I can get past the cast all being too old, but I can’t get past bad songwriting and performances. There’s definitely a diamond in the rough with Dear Evan Hansen, but I’m not sure I’d ever endure those songs again just to be able to experience the story.
The vocal performances don’t really hold up either. A lot of the tunes sound outside of Platt’s vocal range, as if he’s struggling to hit the higher notes. Everybody else kind of coasts through, we’re not talking Pierce Brosnan in Mamma Mia levels of bad here, but nobody shines in their musical numbers which makes them even more puzzling that they’re even there.
The stage show has quite a large fanbase but I just don’t see this story working as a musical at all. The actual tale it tells is excellent and I got really invested in the story and characters. But the songs are bad, plain and simple, and if you’ve chosen to present your story as a musical then the songs need to be as strong (or usually stronger) than the story you’re trying to tell. I can get past the cast all being too old, but I can’t get past bad songwriting and performances. There’s definitely a diamond in the rough with Dear Evan Hansen, but I’m not sure I’d ever endure those songs again just to be able to experience the story.