BY KATE BRETAS October 12 2021
To say that Dear Evan Hansen, a musical that found stardom on Broadway and has largely been deemed heart-wrenching and moving, has been entirely ruined throughout the process of being turned into a movie would be a grave understatement. The movie adaptation of Dear Evan Hansen isn’t terrible in the way that the 2019 version of Cats was terrible, with its horrifying CGI and questionable cast. No, it’s terrible in such a way that while reviewing clips and songs from the film I couldn’t help but wonder how a team of professionals, including those who wrote the source material, could miss the entire point of a highly popular and heavily reviewed musical with a two hour and seventeen minute runtime.
The first offense came a few weeks before the movie was even released when only the tracklist was published and it was revealed that three of the most essential songs had been removed from the musical. “Anybody Have A Map?” is the first of the eliminated tracks sung by protagonist Evan Hansen’s single mother and the mother of the boy, Connor Murphy, who takes his own life in the first act. It establishes Heidi Hansen and Cynthia Murphy respectively as the most sympathetic characters as they express guilt over being uncertain as to how they should help their troubled sons. The second missing track is “Disappear” in which Evan Hansen comes up with the idea of the Connor Project, a non-profit organization meant to preserve Connor Murphy’s memory and help with suicide prevention efforts, and it is also revealed that Evan tried to take his own life as well before the play began. The third song is “Good For You” in which Evan’s mother, to whom he has been lying for weeks, and friends Jard Kleinman and Alana Beck who helped Evan start the Connor Project finally realize that Evan has been wronging them the entire time. They yell at him and sarcastically tell him “good for you” as Evan at last begins to receive recompense for all of the lies he has told throughout the musical and begins to actually realize the magnitude to which he has harmed people.
Now, if the creators of the film were forced to remove a few songs due to certain limitations, that might be understandable, but getting rid of some of the songs most crucial to the entire story? Absolutely not the move, and also absolutely not the situation considering a couple of additional new songs were added into the movie instead and not ones that at all took the places of the missing ones.
Also, can someone please inform me as to why the now nearly 30-year-old Ben Platt needed to reprise his role as a 17-year-old? Besides the fact that his father produced the movie, of course, because what is the film industry without a little nepotism here and there? Clearly it was understood that Ben Platt was entirely too old for the role, but instead of trying a little powder to even out his wrinkles or, I don’t know, not casting a tax-filing, rent-paying adult man as a high school student, they decided to cake his face in the most terrifying makeup and prosthetics one could possibly imagine. Ben Platt may be good at other things, but he certainly wasn’t meant for the screen if these truly are his best takes. He’s awkward and exaggerated and generally not believable as Evan Hansen. Honestly, at points the movie feels like an episode of Doctor Who in which an alien who doesn’t know the first thing about human beings tries to pretend to be a socially anxious teenager, lies about being friends with a dead kid, and then accidentally goes viral on the Internet.
These choices completely butcher the plot and message and the film becomes very confusing as a result. The way it’s structured makes it seem as though Evan is supposed to be the hero of his story and as if one should be rooting for him, when at the same time he’s a 28-year-old man in freakish makeup and prosthetics who makes absolutely awful decisions and comes off as manipulative and nothing if not condemnable.
It’s truly regrettable that the creators didn’t decide to professionally film a live stage production of the original musical as was done with Hamilton: An American Musical in 2020 and instead immortalized the once masterful Dear Evan Hansen as such a peculiar failure of a film.