Dear Evan Hansen – first-look review

“Words fail.” So sings Evan Hansen (Ben Platt), attempt­ing to explain his dev­as­tat­ing­ly cru­el actions, hav­ing lied – that’s putting it mild­ly – to the fam­i­ly of a dead teenag­er, as well as his whole com­mu­ni­ty, about a friend­ship they nev­er had.

It’s at this point toward the end of the film, based on the Tony-win­ning musi­cal and direct­ed for the screen by Stephen Chbosky, that every­thing tru­ly falls apart. If ever there was a moment ​“Dear Evan Hansen” might have attempt­ed to jus­ti­fied itself, it was here. Alas, words fail, as does every­thing else.

It’s not just Platt’s appear­ance in the film, right­ly mocked when the trail­er dropped for look­ing, gen­er­ous­ly, a bit too old to be a high-school­er. It’s not just the premise, about one trou­bled boy con­coct­ing a fan­ta­sy friend­ship with anoth­er trou­bled boy who recent­ly com­mit­ted sui­cide to assuage the grief of that boy’s par­ents and… break out of his own shell as a lon­er with men­tal health issues? (Think World’s Great­est Dad but played as an earnest tale about lone­li­ness, anx­i­ety and depres­sion, plus some annoy­ing-if-catchy songs from the Great­est Show­man guys.) Rather, it’s the near-com­plete lack of aware­ness and reck­on­ing – in both the orig­i­nal mate­r­i­al and its numb­ing­ly flat direc­tion – with the sin­is­ter impli­ca­tions of its own story.

The depths of fail­ure here are dif­fi­cult to over­state, begin­ning with bring­ing Platt back to the role he orig­i­nat­ed on stage despite his age. A choice whose wrong­ness should have been obvi­ous on sight alone – or a screen test at the very least – but only gets worse giv­en the style of performance.

Cos­tumed like a geeky mid­dle-school­er from the ​’80s in a man­ner only a Broad­way audi­ence could find con­vinc­ing, Platt attempts to appear teenaged and awk­ward in out­right the­atri­cal style, hunch­ing his back, clutch­ing his limbs, walk­ing and run­ning with stilt­ed­ness turned to eleven. It might be a less bizarre approach if every­one else in the film were so height­ened, but instead Chbosky has roped in the likes of Amy Adams, Julianne Moore, Kait­lyn Dev­er and Amand­la Sten­berg to ground it all in indie-real­ism, like a musi­cal ver­sion of his 2012 teen dra­ma The Perks of Being a Wallflower.

That those actress­es come out of the ordeal basi­cal­ly unscathed is a tes­ta­ment to their tal­ents, and per­haps a result of the star­tling jux­ta­po­si­tion the audi­ence is pre­sent­ed with every time they share a scene with Platt. It’s hard not to feel bad for Platt, too, watch­ing a per­fect­ly fine per­former strug­gle against the queasy absur­di­ty of the mate­r­i­al and his role in it at this late stage.

Per­haps giv­ing the film the trap­pings of a hit out of Sun­dance – with its colour­ful-but-not-too-colour­ful visu­al style, its cloy­ing cam­er­a­work and edit­ing, and its qui­et, night­time scenes of emo­tion­al con­fes­sion between char­ac­ters before they burst into yet more songs – was Chbosky’s attempt to rec­on­cile the irrec­on­cil­able, but there’s no nobil­i­ty found in the end. One won­ders how, as with Evan Hansen’s orig­i­nal lie, any­one thought this was a good idea to begin with.