‘Dear Evan Hansen’ Movie Review: High School Musical Muddle

[peekaboo]

The blockbuster Broadway show hits some sour notes in its move to the big screen.

 

‘Dear Evan Hansen, ” the screen version of the acclaimed Broadway musical, draws its dramatic energy from the anguish of its young hero, a high-school senior who suffers from a severe anxiety disorder. Painfully lonely and terrified of the rejection that he constantly courts, Evan thinks in obsessive loops and speaks in apologetic whispers, though he sings ardently, sometimes beautifully, of his fears and yearnings. He’s played by Ben Platt, who began to develop the role in 2014, then went on to win a Tony for his brilliance on stage. You needn’t have seen the show—I did not—to understand how powerful his performance must have been. But the film suffers from a different condition, an emotional elephantiasis that is inexorable and ultimately terminal. What was by all accounts a modestly scaled production in all of its live-theater iterations has become a ponderous movie that turns earnest into maudlin, lyrical into lugubrious.

The title comes from an assignment Evan receives from his therapist—write letters to yourself in which you anticipate what will be good about each coming day. This isn’t easy for a social outcast, someone who’s been searching for himself without believing he has a self worth finding. Still, Evan writes them, and the letters might have been therapeutic except that one of them falls into the wrong hands.

Explaining more would be unfair to Steven Levenson’s plot, an intricate construction of mixed motives and unintended consequences in which a lie that Evan tells, and the events surrounding it—including a student’s suicide—make him a social-media celebrity, give him a surrogate family in whose midst he feels thoroughly, if guiltily, loved, and bring him close to the dead boy’s sister, Zoe Murphy ( Kaitlyn Dever ), whom he has previously worshiped from afar. (One layer of the story, an ironic take on the nature of fame in the digital age, loses track of its irony in the antic intensity of adulation that eventually turns to scorn.)

Seen from a therapeutic perspective, “Dear Evan Hansen,” which was directed by Stephen Chbosky (“The Perks of Being a Wallflower”), may well be good for the young audience it’s aimed at. Here’s a mainstream film that addresses such important and timely subjects as teenage depression and suicide. You’re not alone, Evan is assured by a classmate, Alana Beck (Amandla Stenberg), a super-achiever whose soaring ambition conceals her own chronic depression. “There are a lot of people who feel like us, a lot more than you think.” Her message is there for the taking by anyone else who can use it—rather than being a source of guilt or shame, mental illness should be a cause for candor in seeking help.

Kaitlyn Dever as Zoe Murphy and Ben Platt as Evan Hansen

Photo: Universal Studios

And the film is entertaining when it isn’t selling that message of self-acceptance with intrusive insistence. The score, by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul —they’re the team who did the lyrics for “La La Land”—has some lovely songs, starting with “Waving Through a Window,” which Mr. Platt sings in a beguilingly supple tenor punctuated by falsetto flights. (Ms. Stenberg collaborated with Messrs. Pasek and Paul on “The Anonymous Ones,” a strong anthem for her character.) Ms. Dever’s Zoe is endearingly cool and dry, at least at first, welcome qualities in a film that often drenches you with gale-force sentiment. (The supporting cast includes Julianne Moore as Heidi Hansen, Evan’s mother, and Amy Adams as Cynthia Murphy, Zoe’s mother.)

Ben Platt as Evan Hansen and Amandla Stenberg as Alana Beck

Photo: Universal Studios

But there’s the persistent problem of scale, compounded by the film’s length—it feels even longer than its 137-minute running time—plus a pervasive oddity that Mr. Platt brings to his role. He’s simply too old to be playing 17-year-old Evan at this late date. He was 10 years older than that when the film was shot, and he seems older still in certain scenes when he isn’t looking strangely young for reasons that invite but don’t withstand close scrutiny.

Ben Platt as Evan Hansen

Photo: Universal Studios

This is, understandably, a sore point for the star: He reportedly called those who raised it “jerks” in a tweet that was later deleted. Well, I’m one more jerk who couldn’t buy the totality of the performance, even though Mr. Platt is far from the only actor who has played a much younger character—the over-the-adolescent-hill cast of “Grease” comes to mind—and though his face has been youthened, and slightly blurred, by who knows what, some combination of makeup, diffusion filters or CGI. Youth isn’t merely a matter of skin tone or studied naivete. It’s a soulset that’s the counterpart of a mindset, and Evan has grown too senior for his grade.