Movies: Dear Evan Hansen
Why the movie packs a punch and deserves an audience
Without giving away the twist, and without having seen the original Broadway or any stage production, Dear Evan Hansen elicits a range of emotions. The imperfect movie runs long for a stretch. It’s an earnest movie about living a lie which is loaded with powerful music, songs and scenes. Casting is excellent. Julianne Moore, leading man Ben Platt and Amy Adams—and this goes for everyone in the cast—are outstanding.
In layers, Dear Evan Hansen starts right in with an emotional wallop, enveloping the audience in the daily alienation, loneliness and self-doubt of youth. Songs by the songwriters for The Greatest Showman and La La Land, with good acting, screenwriting and direction, narrate life’s innermost problems ranging from grief to depression and anxiety, seriously touching upon suicide, sickness and losing a child.
This is why Dear Evan Hansen works, especially in the first two acts. The hook is a whopper of a lie told by the title character (Platt), whose nurse mother (Moore) isn’t exactly parent of the year. A series of events cascade into his grand and indulgent deception. The picture reckons and accounts for his delusion. Dear Evan Hansen at its root dramatizes the complexity of being honest and having integrity; that these virtues are hard to achieve—that today’s irrationalism discombobulates the active mind—that words and actions once rendered cannot be undone.
Hansen’s lie is also realistic, but only if you think about it. Anyone who’s felt trapped behind a facade will know why. Dear Evan Hansen depicts and squares this, if unevenly, in song, dance and drama, mixing middle class suburban remoteness (evoking Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm and Robert Redford’s Ordinary People) with Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods themes of the being alone. Add wry social commentary about the poisonous effect of trying to live through others vicariously using media that mines people’s pain, suffering and approval and you’ll get the idea.
Today’s government indoctrination — “public education” — of children gets skewered, too, as Dear Evan Hansen dares to dramatize in music that people of varying characteristics and backgrounds could unite and not despise each other. This harmonious theme, which arcs into a reality-based self-esteem theme, could explain why most critics hold the film in contempt. It’s a fine movie. It leaves loose ends. At times, it’s as clumsy as a teenager. But Dear Evan Hansen earns the titles’s irony, redemption and power. It’s a movie with music about summoning courage to search for truth when you become aware that you’re faking reality. It is moving. It is thought-provoking. It depicts the one who overcriticizes, overthinks and overromanticizes until he comes to know the art of saving and remaking his life through introspection, thinking and idealism. How rarely does a modern movie do that.