'Dear Evan Hansen' Causes A Lot Of Conflicting Feels
Starring Ben Platt, Julianne Moore, Kaitlyn Dever, Amy Adams, Amandla Stenberg and Colton Ryan
Rated PG-13
Musical, drama
Run time: 2 hr, 17 min
Directed by Stephen Chbosky
In theaters September 24, 2021
Full disclosure, right up front, I suffer from some mental health issues, including anxiety and depression, so that definitely plays a part in how I felt about this movie.
I’m a sucker for a musical. I’m a sucker for a movie that gives me a fictional reason to shed a tear. I’m a sucker for a coming of age story. All of this would lead you - and me - to believe that Dear Evan Hansen was tailor made for me. It’s all of that and a bag of chips. Or at least some mental illness diagnoses, anyways. In the most vague of summaries, I’m intrigued. A young man (Platt) struggling with mental health issues ends up in a truly insane situation related to a schoolmate committing suicide and a misplaced and misunderstood note, causing some emotional songs and moving (and stressful) scenes. It sounds a bit dark, but bringing mental health to the forefront of media is something I’m usually on board for, so I figured I’d give it a shot.
It turns out, there are somehow some even more questionable aspects to the plot of this musical. The basics are still there. Evan Hansen is a lonely high school kid just trying to survive while struggling with his mental health. He’s given an assignment from his therapist. to write some letters to himself, and when he tries to print one off in the school library, a classmate named Connor (Ryan) happens to pick it up and takes some things out of context and storms off with it. We find out later that this classmate has some struggles of his own and unfortunately, they lead him to commit suicide. His parents (Adams and Pino) find Evan’s letter, assume it was written to him rather than from him and Evan doesn’t have the heart to dash their hopes that their son had a friendship they didn’t know about. Unfortunately, it escalates from there and some really iffy actions and assumptions take place, including a viral tribute video.
I don’t mean to sound quite so cynical about a musical that has meant quite a lot to many, many people. I also don’t want to trivialize the significance of mental health issues being the focal point of a huge hit media production. However, the way it chooses to portray Evan’s story is incredibly cringy. Not only does he (almost understandably) choose to play into the lie Connor’s parents are desperate to believe, but he takes it to another level, fabricating emails, spinning a narrative that hinges solely on a fictionalized memory that Connor’s parents basically spoon fed to him. He becomes close with Connor’s sister, Zoe (Dever), also lying to her about his friendship with Connor and creating even more fabricated conversations about how much Connor actually loved her. And it continues to spiral even further when an over-achieving, social-activism-loving classmate named Alana (Stenberg) decides to take action and creates a fundraiser to restore an orchard (the setting of Evan’s fake story about him and Connor hanging out), and goes even further to make some extremely horrifying choices that somehow make this whole situation even more uncomfortable.
While I did spend a lot of time grimacing or being appalled by these characters’ choices, there are very clearly some wins for this film - namely Ben Platt’s voice. I don’t love that a man who does look like he’s in his mid-20s was playing a teen, but it’s undeniable how incredible his voice is and how it probably would have been difficult to find someone to fill his shoes. The songs alone are what keeps me from rating it a 2/5. Technically speaking, everything about this movie, with a few small exceptions, such as Julianne Moore’s voice (no shade here, but she doesn’t have the Broadway vocals that these songs require), is well done. Until it takes a turn for a worst, I enjoyed Stenberg’s character, which showed that depression and anxiety doesn’t always present in a cookie cutter way. But overall, I’m still struggling with how I feel about Dear Evan Hansen, especially since a movie that clearly was all but perfectly engineered to make me weep actually made me stare horrified at the various turns the plot takes. I think I’d stick to just listening to the original cast recording of the soundtrack.