Alright! Today I'm reviewing the newest musical adaptation to come out of Hollywood. Most of the time I'm not terribly excited about musical adaptations given how terrible most of them are, but they've been on a roll the past few flicks. Hamilton was great, In the Heights was amazing, I haven't seen Everyone's Talking About Jamie (Yet) but it looks good, and Tick, Tick... Boom! and West Side Story are likely rounding out the academy awards this year.
So Dear Evan Hansen was up on the schedule and I was pretty excited. Sure, they cast a 27-year-old as a high schooler, but you know what? Ben Platt originated that role, it's his, makes sense they'd keep him for a movie. Could someone else have done it? Yes. But it's nice that they got the same guy. Besides, we're used to near 30-year-olds in high school, right? Articles like this are fun, but Mean Girls and Spider-Man are still classics and I enjoyed Never Have I Ever.
And it's honestly not this movie's biggest problem. Ben Platt and company act and sing their hearts out, there's no denying that they're all doing their giving it their all. The problem with the casting begins when they try too hard to cover up his age with makeup and end up with a 40-year-old. Numerous close-ups reveal layers of caked on makeup that fills all of his pores... it's not a fault in the casting, but there's definitely fault to be had.
Everyone else looks high school age! Except for the extras. I swear, there was an extra in one shot that just really took me out of the moment, he looked middle-aged. And this is one of the high schools where everyone's a senior or college aged. Listen, I'm in high school. The freshmen literally look like babies. I am now morbidly curious to see what Ben Platt's Evan Hansen would look like next to an actual fresh faced freshman, so... that's neat.
Platt also suffered from what I'm going to call Anakin Skywalker snydrome - as in Attack of the Clones, where Padme asks him to stop staring at her, and he continues to stare at her with the most creepy stare imaginable. Any time they cut to Platt during a conversation or emotional moment, it had that same effect.
But that's the main character. The other characters are pretty great - Kaitlyn Dever plays a pretty great highschooler, everyone likes Amy Adams and Julianne Moore, and Danny Pino as the trusty dad was pitch perfect. Dear Evan Hansen functions as a pretty good drama/thriller about a young man who takes advantage of his classmates' suicide to get closer to their sister.
But it's not a drama. It's a musical. But it's also not a musical. The movie features 11-ish songs? It's about 46 minutes out of 137 minutes, roughly 33%. And each song has a lot of spoken word or the tempo's slow enough to where it just sounds like a conversation was taken to 0.5 speed (Only Us, Words Fail, So Big/So Small are all guilty of this).
They disrupt the pacing momentously. I mean, most musicals suffer a second act drag and are too long as a rule, but Dear Evan Hansen's slow the entire time. It feels like it could end halfway through the movie. My favorite reviewer said that it's a toss-up between this and The Ten Commandments as the longest movie they'd ever seen, and I have to agree.
Like most musicals, the soundtrack begins to blend together and the uninspired songs are likely to bore you by the end, but something I noticed here is that the movie barely has a score otuside of the soundtrack. So many pieces of conversation are just talking, which is fine, but makes for a very monotonous film after two and a half hours.
So it's not a musical and it's not a drama, it's a misshapen and boring version of both. The film never goes deep enough into the moral dilemna of Evan Hansen's actions, largely brushing them aside and only showing the rewards of his white lie until the last ten minutes. This is, in large part, due to them cutting "Good For You," which would've given the side characters something to do and at least acknowledge that lying about knowing someone who committed suicide is wrong.
It would be a really compelling drama or thriller. Unfortunately, it's a musical, a musical so positively dreary and downbeat none of the numbers have energy (Save Sincerely, Me). While In the Heights was a mood lifter and shot of energy, Evan Hansen makes you want to sit in a corner and cry. It's dreafully depressing through and through, which (Combined with the omittance of the happy songs) creates the most downbeat film I've ever seen. I had to go home and watch Ghostbusters to recover.
This is most certainly a crying movie first and foremost. It's only intention seems to be hurting the audience, although whether that be through emotional abuse or through cringe remains up to the viewer. You'll find youself becoming caught up in emotion at least once in the film (You Will Be Found pulled on the heartstrings like it was a tug-of-war contest).
Dear Evan Hansen ventures into extremely grey moral territory with it's plot. While some would say it's disrespectful, others might find it a touching and heartwarming message. But it's a lot of grey in any direction, including the cinemetography. This movie is so sterile I swear they shot it in-between model house showings.
While a morally grey story can be really interesting, the motivations of the characters are often problematic. Evan Hansen is barely a player in his own story, the entire plot stems from other people telling him what to do and Evan occasionally ensuring his white lie continues so he can date the late Connor's sister.
Every character in here is an awful person. Evan's awful, his mom's awful, Connor's awful, Connor's mom is awful, class president Alana's awful, friend-not-friend Jared is awful, they're all awful. The only two that fare well are Zoe Murphy and her dad, mostly because they're the only people not insitgating this mess. They're the only two you can root for in the movie.
But does any of this really matter? The people beind me in the theater were bawling their eyes out by the end, so maybe as long as it reaches one person that's all that matters. As long as it can change one life. Some people need to know they'll be found (But now that I think about it, the movie reinforces the "as long as one person is reached" mentality through and through, maybe it's compensating for itself).
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| Feels like a cheesy "based on a true story" type of nonsense |
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