The Tony award winning musical “Dear Evan Hansen” has made its way to the big screen in a triumphant and exciting way and the whole world couldn’t be happier. I mean, the winner for best musical at the 71st Tony Awards in June 2017 being adapted to film, with Steven Levenson, who wrote the book for the musical, penning the screenplay for the movie, and Ben Platt reprising his role as Evan Hansen, in which he won best actor at said Tony Awards, is the perfect winning formula. What could go wrong? This here is certain to be a critically praised Oscar nominee and candidate for best picture that continues this cultural phenomenon that the musical started.
Right?
Well… uhhh…
While a phenomenon this movie is, a positive phenomenon is a bit more debatable. Yes, the Broadway musical has been a resounding success. And even someone like me who most definitely doesn’t have his finger on the pulse in that area of entertainment is well aware of its existence. “Hamilton” and “Dear Evan Hansen” are the two recent musicals whose recent success has caught on like a wildfire. It’s hard to ignore. I’ve even loved the song “You Will Be Found,” even though I didn’t know much of the context behind it. But the interesting phenomenon that I’ve found here is that this movie adaptation really illustrates how vastly different the cultures are with stage productions and movies. If you were to create a Venn diagram, there are not very many things that intersect. And the expectations from the respective fan bases are quite different. Yet when you forcibly try meld the two together, the ensuing conversations are quite the thing.
Point in case with “Dear Evan Hansen.” I’ve had my eye on this movie adaptation for some time. I was even rather excited for it, being completely ignorant of the plot. And I know many people who have loved the original musical who have been super excited for this movie. But when the film’s trailer dropped back in May, the overall response from the film community was not one of excitement in the least bit. In fact, the response was quite the opposite. This is one of those trailers where the reaction immediately got toxic.
“THAT’S what ‘Dear Evan Hansen’ is about?” was the most common response I heard.
This response actually threw me off. I even posted the trailer on my Facebook page where I said that this looks like the movie of the year and I was beyond excited. So to hear so many people in the film community that I trust and follow ravagingly thrashing this movie in a tone of loud laughter and mockery… just from watching the trailer… had me confused. Some even took it a step further and read the Wiki plot of the play and were more certain than ever that this would be an epic disaster. And again, these are trusted people in the film community that I follow and listen to, not just some trolls on Twitter wanting attention.
Yet this toxic response was to the same exact play that the musical community loved and praised so much that they gave it the highest honor of best musical at the Tonys.
That’s why this is a very interesting phenomenon to me.
Like I said, it left me rather confused. Was I to join my musical friends in praising this to the high heavens or was I going to join the film community in calling this an epic disaster waiting to happen? I didn’t know. And I certainly wasn’t going to spoil the plot of it by reading the Wiki page. At least one of my musical friends assured me in my confusion that there was solid resolution to the conflict people were pointing out, that of our main protagonist lying about his relationship with a fellow classmate who just committed suicide after an awkward misunderstanding leads into an even more awkward conundrum. I mean, I watched the trailer. I saw that premise unfold. But I assumed that there was a point to it beyond what it initially looked. And I also assumed based on the song that I loved that this was a movie that was going to bring awareness to the issues of depression and suicide among teens.
Yet I remained confused, so I become increasingly curious to figure it all out for myself. What was all the hype about from the musical crowd? And what was all the negativity directed at from the film community? And where on that already divisive spectrum was I going to fall?
Part of me would’ve loved to have gone into it completely blind, having no idea what the reviews were. But it was kinda hard to do that when the movie debuted at TIFF in early September. That crowd wasn’t kind to it at all. A podcast I listen to called “Awards Radar” was the first to let the cat out of the bag for me. The host of that podcast, who went to Toronto for the festival, revealed his feelings that the movie was really bad. From then on, reviews kept trickling in until the explosion of them leading up to the weekend of release and critics were absolutely lighting this movie on fire. It currently sits at a very poor 32 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. And even when you read that third of them that are positive, most of them really aren’t that positive.
So yes, I went in knowing very well that most of the critics I follow hated this movie. And I feel like being very transparent with that. Does that cloud my judgment with how I ended up feeling? Maybe. I don’t know. But I can assure you that it gives me zero pleasure in this instance to come here and tear this movie apart. Sometimes that is fun. Sometimes it’s very therapeutic after watching something that really rubbed you the wrong way. But in this instance, I find it very stressful. And whether or not you believe me, I tried really hard with this one. I went in very neutral, despite knowing the toxic reaction, because I’m also very aware of how many people love this musical. And I’m also even more aware of the fact that the musical crowd are the most ruthless and vicious fan base around. They will not, and I repeat, THEY WILL NOT accept your opinion if you don’t like the thing that they love. They will thrash you. They will harass you. And they don’t even see an avenue in their brains where it is possible that even one negative thing can be said about their majestic masterpiece.
Believe me. I’ve been down this road before. I still don’t hear the end of it in regards to “The Greatest Showman.” And that movie came out four years ago. It has become the bane of my existence. And it’s not the only time that’s happened. The “Les Mis” movie from 2012 was a torrential disaster. Both in terms of my personal reaction to it and in terms of how I was treated for that opinion. And I find it frustrating because most musicals I watch I do enjoy. But from a positive opinion I get a high five or a pat on the back. But then it’s back to jumping down my throat for the ones I have negative things to say about. I even had one of my friends attack me pretty harshly for me trashing that dumb “Cinderella” adaptation from about a month ago. So again, I find zero happiness in all of this.
But the fact still stands.
“Dear Evan Hansen” is a train wreck. In my opinion.
It’s not as bad production wise as that “Cinderella” movie. And it’s not as big of a nightmare across the board as “The Greatest Showman.” It is a competently made film in terms of the actual filming techniques. The songs themselves are really good. And the singing is excellent. So if that’s all you care about, then sure. But the plot of the movie itself and the themes that it presents are horribly misguided. And if you missed the title of this review when you clicked on it, me illustrating exactly why requires me to dive into spoilers. I’m not going to break down every last element of the plot, especially since I’ve already written a review and a half of setup, but I need to talk about the general plot direction of this disaster and why the resolution of the events here really upset me. And I know many of you are curious to hear those exact reasons because I’ve spent this whole weekend talking about this with people who are already baffled as to how a single soul could ever say anything negative, yet I refused to get into the meat of it because I didn’t want to openly discuss spoilers on Facebook or around those who haven’t seen the movie, yet all of the reasons have everything to do with the resolution of this movie.
So here we go. Disagree with me if you want. But I hope you can at least respect my opinion and understand all of this that I’ve discussed so far.
As I’ve already discussed, and as you are already very aware, “Dear Evan Hansen” is a movie that makes an attempt to discuss the very sensitive subjects of mental health, depression, anxiety, and suicide. It is not a crowd-pleaser. It is not a popcorn flick where you can turn off your brain and enjoy a bunch of people dancing and singing. It is very deep and heavy. And that’s the type of thing that director Stephen Chbosky is already experienced in as he previously wrote and directed “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” in 2012, which is also a very heavy movie that I think is very well done. He also directed “Wonder” in 2017, which is a very heartwarming film about a young kid who doesn’t fit in. So Chbosky knows how to do this type of movie. In principle, anyways. Given that this is an adaptation of a previously written musical and not something he did on his own, I’m not going to give him too much flack for the specific direction this took. But the point is I’m well aware of the director’s history and thus knew the type of movie I was getting myself into.
And maybe because of that, I was more hyper-focused on the exact outcome of this dilemma that Evan Hansen in this movie finds himself in. I wasn’t sitting casually in my seat enjoying the music they were singing. I even found that to be a bit distracting because I thought a heavy, emotion story like this could’ve done with less bursting out into song when the tensions became high. A conflict of tone perhaps. A musical adaptation of “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” sounds like a horrible idea, yet that’s kinda how things felt at times. But nevertheless, I needed to know how Evan proceeds with this deception of his.
Which, quite frankly, felt rather bogus to me in the first place. I can relate to Evan being extremely anxious and nervous, not knowing what to do and how to react in certain situations. Not shy, perhaps, but very socially awkward. And I think from an acting perspective, Ben Platt pulls that off really well. He obviously knows this character quite well and how he’s supposed to portray him. But the idea that if you somehow ended up in the situation of the parents believing you were best friends with a guy who was a jerk and bully to you that you would lie to them about everything, within days of him committing suicide? No I don’t buy it.
Evan writes himself a letter. Evan is honest in the letter about how he feels. This is an assignment from Evan’s therapist. Yet Connor steals this letter, walks away with it, then kills himself. And in a horribly awkward turn of events, Evan’s letter that Connor steals just happens to look like a suicide note from Connor, a final letter to a supposed friend of his?
I don’t buy that this is a thing that would happen. We’re watching a movie that tries to discuss the emotional and mental anguish that many are secretly going through, yet our main plot point involves a bogus situation that I don’t think anyone would realistically run into? That in and of itself is a problematic scenario. A conflict of tones. Everyone involved wants to tell a story of about mental health, yet the core of the plot is a crazy and wild thing of fiction that just does not seem believable to me.
But not just that, when Evan is approached by Connor’s parents, who now think Evan is best friends with Connor, Evan avoids telling them the truth? This is a very easy situation to resolve, even for a socially awkward person who doesn’t know how to handle himself.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Murphy. Connor didn’t write that letter. That’s a letter that I wrote to myself. Connor stole it from me and folded it up in his pocket. I didn’t actually know Connor too well outside of a few random occurrences where we crossed paths.”
Boom. There we go. Situation resolved. Movie over.
And even if you completely fumble that initial situation because your brain freezes and you didn’t know what to do, if you have a heart and if you have a soul, you’re going to figure out a way to fix that as soon as you can in your next meeting with these parents. And if you don’t know how to do that, the logical path for the character of Evan, who is so full of anxiety and social awkwardness, is to avoid them at all costs. That’s not the right decision, either. But it’s a decision that kinda makes sense for this character.
But instead, he’s going to go to dinner with them? He’s going to immediately go to his only friend and figure out a way to create email interactions between the two of them, even though I highly doubt that high school students from Gen Z socially communicate through email in an age of cell phones and social media? And he’s going to take advantage of Connor’s suicide to finally date Connor’s sister?
All of these situations just felt gross to me. It made me uncomfortable. And it felt unrealistic. At every twist and turn with this movie, I wanted so desperately for Evan to come clean as soon as he could, so then we could actually focus on the suicide of this kid, why he committed suicide, and have a real discussion about mental health awareness. But yet instead of attempting to have this conversation, we instead decided to go deeper and deeper into this insanely awkward rabbit hole that just started to make me feel worse and worse. Especially since none of it felt like real things that the character we set up would actually do. And we started to focus more on the movie becoming a teen romance that came completely out of left field, while sidelining what should’ve been our real focus and cheapening the potential message that could’ve been told.
Yet even up to this point, I was willing to suspend my disbelief and accept this plot that was happening, as long as we had some sort of resolution that made me feel positive about this movie that I was watching.
But then I hit the breaking point.
And in the worst turn of events, this breaking point just happened to be the moment I was most anticipating. The performance of the song that I had loved for years. “You Will Be Found.”
This could’ve been the moment where Evan came clean. Not just to Connor’s parents, but to everyone else. I knew that a speech was coming. I knew there was a big moment where he sings this song, which is absolutely incredible. This could’ve been an honest moment and an honest performance. He reveals that he didn’t know Connor. That he wrote the letter that made Connor’s parents believe they were friends. Then give some sort of emotional speech about mental health awareness that implements this beautiful song. Maybe we then shift focus to Connor and why no one knew him and why it is a tragedy that this led him to take his life. That maybe if someone had become his friend, perhaps he would still be there with them. Something to that effect could’ve actually made this the movie of the year.
But instead, that performance of the song is actually the most despicable, heartless thing that Evan does. Because he sings a song to the whole school, which becomes viral to the whole community, wherein he continues this lie and tells everyone that him and Connor were best friends. And throughout the whole song, I was screaming in anguish, devastated that this song that I had loved may have just been ruined forever because it’ll be hard to disconnect the context from the actual music and lyrics.
From this point on, I hated Evan. I thought he was a horrible character and a horrible person. Yet it still made no sense for him to do these things because it felt out of character. So the movie tried to make me conflicted. It tried to give him emotions. But he had just done a heartless act that felt unforgivable. And it is only made worse throughout the movie as he proceeds to stand at the head of this organization set up to bring awareness to Connor’s situation, having completely fooled the parents and the sister, now girlfriend, while also getting the whole community to donate to this and dragging along the innocent popular girl along with it, forcing her to lie and deceive the whole community without her realizing it.
And when does he FINALLY come clean? Only when he is painted into the most desperate of corners, perhaps months after the initial chain of events. And it all just made me feel sick.
Evan Hansen is most undoubtedly the villain of this movie. And one of the most malicious villains I’ve seen portrayed in film. He ends up making a video to Instagram confessing what he had done and told everyone to not hate the family, but to hate him. And that was easy for me. I did hate him.
Now the question you might be asking yourself is why do I think “Dear Evan Hansen” is such a gross film, yet in the same sentence say that “Joker” is my favorite film of 2019 or that “Breaking Bad” is one of the best TV shows that I’ve ever watched?
The answer is quite simple actually. First off, Walter White and Arthur Fleck feel like real characters that could exist in reality. Decisions that they made felt like real decisions that their characters could’ve made. The stories become a character study and a warning sign as to how someone who has a good heart and is a good person could devolve into someone so malicious and terrible. And they frame their main characters properly. As villains. Like with Evan Hansen, there is a point in “Breaking Bad” where I felt Walter White crossed a line that made me never like him again. But that was the point. These were the emotions that I was supposed to feel. There was never a point where the writers tried to make him sympathetic or redeemable. They didn’t ever ask me to like the character of Walter White, rather they purposely tried to make me feel sad for where he ended up and devastated at the consequences that this created. And when everything imploded in the episode “Ozymandias,” I was so emotionally traumatized that I had to wait a day or two before finishing the show, which had an episode or two after that. And I watched this several years after it had already finished. And that’s what I was supposed to feel. “Last Jedi” director Rian Johnson successfully created the greatest episode of television ever Because everything was framed to perfection.
Now maybe you disagree with me, and you’re allowed to have that opinion, but the reason I felt so upset at “Dear Evan Hansen” is because I personally felt that the writers and the director tried to make Evan Hansen feel relatable and sympathetic. If they had owned up to him being a sociopath and purposely made him a hateable character and framed it as such, while making decisions that such a sociopath would realistically make due to being so emotionally depressed and traumatized, then maybe this works. But I felt like they still painted him as a hero. They wanted you to make you like him. And they even gave him an attempted redemption arc with him researching who Connor was and finding a video clip of him playing the guitar, sending it to the family as some sort of peace offering, which they seem to accept. This arc is a further insult to an already detestable film and was apparently invented for this movie, which is really strange. The same dude who wrote the play had the opportunity to fix anything about his play, but ended up making it unnecessarily worse?
So here we are at the end of the movie and Evan is sitting there with his now ex-girlfriend in this field or orchard that Connor actually did like being in. And they were there for reasons that I didn’t understand. And while they were talking, I was thinking to myself, “Please don’t end here. Please don’t end here. Please don’t end here.” The movie was already super long, but it didn’t feel like they had given any sort of resolution to this plot that was already frustrating and distracting from what the movie could’ve been. But there had to be more. No way they were going to end this thing like this.
But it ended.
Dang.
A hopeful me became completely deflated and I angrily stormed out of the theater. While listening to the rest of the people in my theater give it a round of applause. And I knew I was in for it. People are going to love this movie and they weren’t going to let me hear the end of it or accept my negative opinions of this thing. And that sucked.
The real unfortunate thing is that there is a potential movie in here that could’ve been really good. Ben Platt knows how to sing. The songs are well written and well composed. The actors are all really good. And there are story arcs that could’ve worked really well. I thought Connor was set up in a great way. I could tell he was an angry and mentally broken human being. We could’ve explored that more. Halfway through the movie, the super popular, outgoing girl who is in charge of everything in the school reveals to Evan that she is dealing with a lot of the same things he is. That whole sequence was really incredible. Because, yes, not all people with mental health issues are socially awkward, outwardly depressed people. There are a lot of people who look like they have everything figured out and you would never know that they are actually completely broken inside. And I loved that whole sequence.
But instead of focusing on all of that, they focused on this lie. And they took us through a chain of events that never felt believable. And they made Evan make a series of decisions that didn’t make any sense for his character. And they resolved things in a horrifically gross way. All while sidelining the parts of the movie that I thought could’ve worked really well. And I think the result is a movie that does a real disserve to the issues that it’s attempting to discuss.
I don’t know what grade to give this. I don’t know if there’s a number that could sum up everything that I experienced. So I’m not going to give it one. It’s a very competently made, well sung movie musical that is so horribly misguided that it made me sick inside. Whatever grade you think accurately sums that up, that’s the grade that it gets.
But again, my whole theater was sobbing and they all gave it a round of applause. And I’ve already had baffled friends chew me out all weekend. So what do I know?
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