REVIEW: Dear Evan Hansen

 

Times are hard for lovers of the musical movie. Our selections are few and far between, leaving the genre always hanging in the balance, one or two flops away from dissolving into oblivion. So what do we do with a room-temperature helping like the film adaptation of Dear Evan Hansen? Not much, I'm afraid.

The movie follows anxiety-ridden Evan Hansen, a cripplingly timid high school senior who self-soothes with various rituals prescribed by his therapist (whom we curiously never see onscreen), like writing motivational letters to himself. One such letter is snatched by a troubled student, Connor Murphy, who commits suicide days later. When Connor's parents find the letter, they mistakingly assume their son had a secret friendship with Evan. Unwittingly, Evan becomes a window into the life of Connor, and Connor's family worships him for it. Feeling seen overwhelms Evan and in order to stay in the sun, he continues the charade, but soon the spotlight intensifies into something like a refining fire. At what cost will Evan cling to his performance?

Evan's long-standing fiction is ripe grounds for captivating drama. It's a point in Evan's favor that he seems motivated less by earning points with the kids at the popular table than by being embraced by the support team of Connor's family. 

    Just so, the plot is more buoyed by its potential than by its execution. We see the impact of Connor's death opening many wounds across many characters, but the film only tends to a select few of them. Zoe, Connor's sister and the apple of Evan's eye, feels conflicted over the death of a brother who tormented her in life. Swimming in that emotional maelstrom might have, I don't know, confronted the audience with some hard but beautiful truths about the complexities of mental health and family binds, but I honestly don't even remember how or if the film resolved that line. Maybe the stage show handled it better? 

    Director Stephen Chbosky seems to want to film this story like a traditional teen drama, like he did with The Perks of Being a Wallflower but with a few song numbers stitched in. Consequently, the film feels distinct from other musical films that traffic in song-and-dance more freely. 

    Some parts of this experiment actually work. It's a tender mercy that the singers can actually hold their own, a regrettable rarity in the modern musical world. (Special shoutout to the Murphy family, especially the always effervescent Amy Adams.) And still, the singing holds onto a certain spontaneity, like the music is coming naturally from the characters in real-time, not a prerecorded soundtrack. 

But more often than not, trying to feed both camps --angsty teen drama and inspirational musical extravaganza--leads to a conflict of interest. The overcast color palette doesn't exactly lend itself to the vivid emotional landscape the movie wants to paint or the fantastical whimsy that musical movies require. I suppose there's something to be said for trying to make a musical that visually reflects the dim headspace of a teenager wracked with anxiety. The resulting film would have certainly been boundary-breaking, but a feat like that requires more cleverness than compromise. This film only knows how to do the latter. 

There are a select few numbers that actually embrace some musical stylism (e.g. "Sincerely, Me"), and you'll remember them when wading through the film's seventeenth round of living room karaoke. (All the while, Ben Platt and his hyperactive eyebrows still think they're still performing live on stage.)

The movie's biggest punch isn't that it's actively bad, it just turns a juicy premise and songbook boring. Like an insecure high-schooler, the film just won't reach for the high notes. By sinking for so long in no man's land, the music peters out, and the end result is regrettably bland, bordering on insincere.

Oh, well. We still have In the Heights.

                --The Professor