by Cain Noble-Davies
Worth: $4.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Ben Platt, Amy Adams, Julianne Moore, Kaitlyn Dever, Amandla Stenberg, Colton Ryan
Intro:
...a tonal schmaltzpocalypse on par with trying to turn Joker into a frothy rom-com...
Even with how widely popular the original musical has become since its 2015 debut, there’s a good chance that this film adaptation will be the first experience a lot of audiences will have of Dear Evan Hansen.
The story reads like Collateral Beauty The Musical, reaching so hard to make the audience feel something while aggressively trying to hand-wave away the manipulative fashion in which it’s making the attempt. Here, it involves the titular Evan Hansen (Ben Platt) who, through a series of misunderstandings, manages to convince everyone around him that he was the only friend of his classmate and recent suicide victim, Connor (Colton Ryan).
It is enough to make one’s teeth itch, watching this guy dig himself into an ever-deepening pit, while the film around him bends over backwards to see the ‘positive’ side of all this stomach-churning discomfort.
This narrative still could have worked, and the hit musical is proof of that. Buried somewhere in here is an interesting idea for a black comedy, all about trying to see the lighter side of a very dark situation where a lie can bring the most comfort. Think High School Musical directed by Christopher Nolan… But such potential remains buried thanks to Stephen Chbosky’s (Wonder, The Perks of Being a Wallflower) direction, who is seemingly uninformed of the naked ridiculousness of the story and keeps presenting it in the most po-faced manner possible. And when it treats itself this seriously, it makes the audience follow suit.
Admittedly, the musical numbers in-between all of this are well-performed and decently composed, but it can be difficult to make them out over the sound of Connor spinning in his grave.
Embodying the worst tendencies of both dramatic musicals and Maintain The Lie plot developments, Dear Evan Hansen is such a phenomenal miscalculation as to be quite aggravating in its audacity. It is a tonal schmaltzpocalypse on par with trying to turn Joker into a frothy rom-com … or remaking Jan Komasa’s The Hater so that Tomasz is the altruistic hero. “Words fail”, indeed.
