Review: Dear Evan Hansen Is in Penitent Conversation with an Improbable Musical

The film works harder to fix the problems with its source material than to establish itself as an independent piece of art.

Dear Evan Hansen
Photo: Universal Pictures

“Will I ever be more than I’ve always been?” implores the isolated and quite anxious Evan (Ben Platt) in a central soliloquized lyric in director Stephen Chbosky’s Dear Evan Hansen. That question seems to guide this apprehensive adaptation of the 2017 Tony Award-winning musical that works harder to fix the problems with its source material than to establish itself as an independent piece of art.

On stage, Dear Evan Hansen’s catchy but manipulative songs by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul clashed with Steven Levenson’s darkly comic, and often very funny, book that charted the destructive lengths that a lonely teenager will go to fit in. The earnestness of the score, like the show’s unironic anthem of not-aloneness, “You Will Be Found,” seems queasily matched with the emotional havoc that Evan wreaks on his journey to find that same acceptance.

The show’s setup remains largely the same in Levenson’s screen adaptation. Evan, struggling with debilitating social anxiety, writes a daily letter of affirmation to himself, as recommended to him from his therapist. But when one of those messages, beginning “Dear Evan Hansen,” is found on the body of Connor Murphy (Colton Ryan), a classmate who’s taken his own life, Evan starts to spin a convoluted web of lies to convince everyone that Connor was his best friend.

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The show’s more cynical critics rightly struggled with the tonal mismatch of a feel-good Broadway musical that does little to push back against a protagonist willing to ingratiate himself with Connor’s bereaved parents (Amy Adams and Danny Pino) and to pursue the affections of the dead boy’s sister, Zoe (Kaitlyn Dever), who becomes reliant on Evan’s fictions to find closure in her tortured relationship with her late brother.

Levenson clearly set out to patch up some, if not all, of those incongruities. Alana (Amandla Stenberg), the go-getter student body president who persuades Evan to launch a viral movement advocating for mental health awareness in the wake of Connor’s death, gets a beefier backstory and a great new song, “The Anonymous Ones,” that boasts the soundtrack’s most thoughtful lyric, about the stigmas around anxiety and depression. That’s a step up for a minor character who’s been the only role in the show usually played by black actors.

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Evan’s relationship with Zoe has also been somewhat de-creepified, since she now instigates their romance. And, most importantly, Evan has a new accountability and repentance arc that makes amends for the stage musical’s willingness to offer him redemption without much space for self-reflection. All of those new scenes stand out as the film’s strongest, and Stenberg and Dever’s performances particularly pierce through the over-attention the screenplay pays to Evan: they are fiercely independent from the story’s tendency to abandon them.

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The film, though, spends too much time in penitent dialogue with the source material, and watching it sometimes feels more like sitting through the creators’ own redemption arcs rather than discovering the more cohesive, crystallized work of art that might exist on the other side of the revision process. As front and center as Levenson’s rewrites are in the end, they don’t fully integrate into an already convoluted plot.

John M. Chu’s In the Heights drew a new blueprint for how to expand a musical, blurring fantasy and reality and memory through surprising visual reinventions that could only be found on screen. Dear Evan Hansen, which had an eight-person cast with no ensemble on Broadway, seems to diminish behind the camera’s literal-minded lens.

With a few notable exceptions—like a sequence in which Evan and Jared (Nik Dodani) forge an email from Connor, who they imagine literally rewinding every time they make an edit—the film’s ordinary landscape of high school hallways with abundant personality-free extras doesn’t feel lived in or lit up by the shifts from speech to song. Where the stage production’s often abstract sets emphasized video screens that figuratively illustrated the claustrophobic burdens and pressures of being part of adolescent communities, both IRL and online, the film, in its lack of imagination, looks more like a strangely sad High School Musical sequel.

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Perhaps Chbosky’s biggest miss is in failing to find a way to replace the bond between Evan and the audience formed across theater’s broken fourth wall. When Platt gets to show Evan’s wryness, his secret sly sense of humor, and the warmth he hides when he so often recedes into his shell, the character becomes crisply real. More often, though, the film version of Evan seems calibrated towards precision-emoting, as if each moment features the most extreme version of every shake and stutter and sob hand-picked from Platt’s years of live performances.

On paper, Dear Evan Hansen is a more cohesive, far more honest musical now. But as a film that strives to let its audience deepen their empathy, or may just see themselves reflected, through the characters’ struggles with mental health, it’s more likely to leave viewers, like Evan himself, on the outside, waving, wistfully, through a window.

Score: 
 Cast: Ben Platt, Kaitlyn Dever, Amandla Stenberg, Nik Dodani, Julianne Moore, Amy Adams, Colton Ryan, Danny Pino  Director: Stephen Chbosky  Screenwriter: Steven Levenson  Distributor: Universal Pictures  Running Time: 137 min  Rating: PG-13  Year: 2021  Buy: Video

Dan Rubins

Dan Rubins is a writer, composer, and arts nonprofit leader. He’s also written about theater for CurtainUp, Theatre Is Easy, A Younger Theatre, and the journal Shakespeare. Check out his podcast The Present Stage.

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