Best of 2023: Dear Evan Hansen Is Yet Another Illustration That What Works Onstage Can Die An Agonizing Death on Film

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I’ve been writing a column about famous failures for sixteen years. Sixteen years! That’s a lot of time. During that seeming eternity I’ve written about pretty much all of the biggest box-office disasters and creative boondoggles. 

You can’t cover the wonderful world of failed entertainment without writing about the epic boondoggle Dear Evan Hansen. It is the floppiest of flops, a song-laden stinker that was eviscerated by critics and audiences alike for, among other offenses, casting Ben Platt, a man pushing his thirties as its seventeen year old protagonist. Platt played the role on Broadway to great acclaim and a Tony but four very long years separated his theatrical and film performances as Evan.

If Ben Platt’s Evan Hansen has trouble fitting in with his high school classmates, it’s probably because he’s old enough to be their dad and every time they see him they think he’s a 21 Jump Street-style narc pretending poorly to be 17.

Ah but Dear Evan Hansen has problems above and beyond the geriatric appearance and dazzling anti-charisma of star and AARP heartthrob Ben Platt, whose performance mostly consists of slouching.

Dear Evan Hansen has a plot with a legally actionable resemblance to Bobcat Goldthwait’s 2009 masterpiece World’s Greatest Dad. But where Goldthwait’s very dark comedy mined the premise for bitter laughs as well as surprising pathos and emotion Dear Evan Hansen goes all on in dewy earnestness. 

Goldthwait’s cult comedy and director Stephen Chbosky’s adaptation of Stephen Levenson’s Tony Award-winning musical are both about the eminently avoidable deaths of teenagers who were utterly worthless human beings, real irredeemable pieces of shit. In World’s Greatest Dad a uniquely awful teen dies performing autoerotic asphyxiation. In Dear Evan Hansen a depressed, belligerent bully commits suicide with only a note addressed to the titular milksop on him when he is found. 

Both films explore how we romanticize and idealize the dead, how we instinctively slap halos over the dearly departed whether they deserve them or not. World’s Greatest Dad and Dear Evan Hansen are about the human tendency to project positive saintly qualities onto the dead as a way of softening the bleak finality of death and the painful, often complicated emotions death engenders. 

It’s tough to understand anyone in their full complexity, alive or dead, so our tributes to those who are no longer with us simplify and idealize their tricky existences into pat narratives of heroism and nobility. 

The big difference is that Goldthwait finds the comedy and humanity in this achingly human story where Dear Evan Hansen belabors its points relentlessly and endlessly in a boondoggle that is painfully earnest and earnestly painful. 

There’s no flop quite like the flop adaptation of a hit musical. When a theatrical musical works as a movie, it feels like the most natural and organic process in the world. When it does not, the results are often surreal, bizarre and off-putting, as in Cats, Rent and Dear Evan Hansen. 

When a theatrical musical film adaptation goes awry it can feel like it takes place in a bizarre alternate universe utterly unlike ours for reasons that go above and beyond people regularly breaking into song while accompanied by unseen instruments and invisible orchestras. 

Dear Evan Hansen’s screenplay makes cognitive dissonance impossible. My brain violently rejected pretty much everything that the film was doing, beginning with trying to pass off an old man as a young whippersnapper. 

Nobody knows I’m secretly 27!

The film opens with Evan in a familiar state: sad, anxious and terrified to enter the toxic ecosystem of a typical high school. 

To help him cope with his Depression and Anxiety Evan’s therapist encourages him to write a letter to himself, print it out and then take it to his next appointment. 

It’s supposed to be a pep talk. Instead it’s full of gloomy sentiments and self-doubt. Before he can retrieve the letter from the printer it is intercepted by Connor Murphy (Colton Ryan), a deeply depressed bully who thinks that Evan wrote it to antagonize him, since it includes a reference to his sister Zoe (Kaitlyn Dever), who Evan has a seemingly doomed crush on. 

Just a gal enjoying a laugh with her grandfather

Musicals do not need to be realistic to be successful. After all, everyone loves Starlight Express despite it being an inaccurate portrayal of the railroad industry. But Dear Evan Hansen is so wildly, consistently, persistently and pervasively far-fetched that it’s almost impressive. 

Without the immediacy of actors in the flesh mere feet away from us everything feels egregiously fake and wrong. 

This extends to Connor having the letter on him, and nothing else, when he commits suicide. This leads Connor’s mom Cynthia (Amy Adams) and dad Larry (Danny Pino) to think that their son and Evan were not just close friends but soulmates whose tender bond offers a tantalizing glimpse into a side of Connor who wasn’t a rage-choked asshole with no redeeming qualities. 

Evan at first denies being friends with Connor but Cynthia is having none of it. She doesn’t just want to believe that her son had a secret soft side he apparently only showed his dearest friend; she needs to believe it. She needs to believe that Connor was something more than what he appeared to be. 

Once she locks onto this fantasy version of Connor as a nice, sensitive, misunderstood boy she refuses to let go. 

Of course Evan should clear up the misunderstanding at the heart of the film but if he did there would be no movie. That would, honestly, be vastly preferable to Dear Evan Hansen existing and it just keeps veering farther and farther away from justifying its bloated, morose, unfortunate existence with every passing minute.  

Adams is a wonderful actress who cannot make an impossible character believable. Everything about Dear Evan Hansen is ridiculously over the top, including its anti-hero’s fidgety, twitchy burlesque of depression and anxiety. It’s musical theater big and that is way that is too fucking loud and theatrical for film. 

Evan makes up an elaborate backstory for his imaginary friendship with Connor, even creating a series of emails fleshing out their furtive faux bond. 

He’s seemingly Connor’s only friend so he gets a prime spot at his memorial, where he sings a speech so powerful that it goes viral and makes Connor an instant icon, the tragic, youthful face of suicide and depression. 

Evan barely seems capable of coherence, let alone eloquence. Yet the movie asks us to believe that he gives a speech so moving that people all over the world are so blown away by it that they feel the need to share it with everyone they know. 

In a scene that’s, honestly, no creepier than the rest of the film, Evan assures Connor’s sister Zoe that despite how he might have treated her, Connor actually loved and admired her by passing off his own romantic feelings towards the teenager as the familial love of her dead brother. 

Casting a 27 year old whose father, in a staggering coincidence, happens to be the film’s producer, as someone a decade younger makes Evan’s already creepy and deeply unsympathetic behavior seem even more unhinged and unforgivable. 

The meta implication is that this adult has snuck into a teen world and is manipulating it to his own sick, selfish ends. 

Dear Evan Hansen needs us to believe that Evan isn’t the worst person in the world because he’s doing bad things for good reasons. He’s lying in order to give a grief-stricken family comfort in a time of great sadness and hope and meaning to a world desperately in need of them. 

But he never seems like anything other than a morose creep. It does not help that the songs all sound pretty much the same. They all seem like minor variations on the same somber ballad with earnest lyrics about sadness and also hopelessness and misery but grief as well. 

Dear Evan Hansen is depressing even for a movie about depression, grief and teen suicide. It’s the kind of endless slog where you tell yourself it’s almost over to make things more bearable, then see that you still have seventy three minutes left to go. 

The posthumous cult of Colton is led by Alana Beck (Amandla Stenberg), a popular, driven African-American classmate who sees in the Colton Evan more or less created from scratch a kindred spirit who shared her depression and loneliness but did a much worse job of hiding it and fitting in.

She starts a fundraiser to raise money for an apple orchard in Colton’s memory in a subplot angrily begging for the cutting room floor. 

Evan eventually comes clean to Connor’s family and the imaginary world he had created through his words comes crashing down. 

The director has said that the film existed in order to capture Platt's performance for posterity, saying that Platt’s "understanding of the character is so complete and so profound. I couldn't imagine anybody else playing it. It's his part. I felt very strongly about it. And to me it was never even a consideration.”

Whatever magic Platt possessed onstage didn’t make it onscreen. His performance alone would be enough to sink the misbegotten musical but he’s just one of an endless series of fatal flaws. 

Dear Evan Hansen is yet another illustration that theater and film are two very different mediums, and what works spectacularly in one can die an agonizing death in another. Few hit musicals have onscreen as publicly or dramatically as this all-time stinker. 

Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Fiasco 

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