A Broadway hit takes a big miss on the silver screen
★★
So much storytelling in popular culture, musical theater included, relies on the narrative usefulness and emotional exploitation of the delayed secret. And “Dear Evan Hansen” would be nothing without it.
At his therapist’s urging, high school senior Evan, dealing with social anxiety disorder and a harsh self-image, writes letters of reassurance and encouragement to himself. After a tense encounter at school, one of these letters ends up in the hands of another troubled senior, a boy Evan hardly knows even though Evan has been nursing a crush on the boy’s sister for what feels to Evan like forever.
The boy, Connor, commits suicide very early in “Dear Evan Hansen.” His grieving parents assume Evan’s letter to himself, found in their late son’s possession, was written by Connor to Evan, and that the boys were supportive, understanding friends.
The lie spirals. Evan doesn’t have the heart or the nerve to correct Connor’s family’s reading of the situation. Then the hash-tagged phenomenon #TheConnorProject, designed to help all sorts of kids in crisis and in need, goes viral. Evan’s dodgy act of atonement builds up his own social capital. For most of the musical, which premiered on Broadway in 2016, we watch Evan as he’s singing, dodging, aching, riding for the inevitable fall.
Was the fall of the film version also inevitable?
Maybe. Mainly, the movie we have here reminds us that what works on a stage, within
the nonrealistic world and performance momentum of stage musicals, lessens a lot of story problems that movies tend to heighten.
Director Stephen Chbosky’s film already has gotten a ton of grief for Tony winner Ben Platt’s performance in the title role. Yes, he’s 27, playing a teenager (26 when it was filmed, though just out of his teens when “Dear Evan Hansen” was first workshopped). Stockard Channing was 34 when the movie version of “Grease” came out. That didn’t kill that movie.
The issue with “Dear Evan Hansen,” I think, is more about where a firsttime director of screen musicals puts the camera, frames the actors and builds the numbers. All of that comes after the work on the script, adapted by the stage version’s librettist Steven Levenson. Four songs from the Broadway score by the seriously talented “La La Land” and “Greatest Showman” songwriters Benj Pasek and Justin Paul have been cut. The film version starts out like an unapologetic musical and then, for too long, apologizes for being one.
Why isn’t this movie
more satisfying? Partly it’s the willful excruciation of the story’s premise. The delayed secret is the hangnail: It won’t end well. Partly it’s Chbosky straining, visually, to keep a movie audience close to the emotional lives of the characters without crowding them.
Chbosky can reassure himself that a slew of Broadway legends, from Harold Prince with “A Little Night Music” to Susan Stroman with “The Producers,” couldn’t figure out how to do it. Richard Attenborough, with “A Chorus Line,” really couldn’t. “Dear Evan Hansen” preserves many of the selling points of its stage incarnation. But “preserves” isn’t the same as “activates.”
MPAA rating: PG-13 (for thematic material involving suicide, brief strong language and some suggestive references) Running time: 2:17
How to watch: Premieres Sept. 23 in theaters.