You should never pity a movie. Not even a desperately misguided movie. Not even if it’s about a depressed kid that capitalizes on the suicide of another student, and is based on a Broadway show with the same subject matter, with songwriter Benj Pasek originally taking inspiration from (capitalizing on?) the real-life overdose of his high school classmate. You can loathe a movie, and I certainly loathe Dear Evan Hansen, but movies are too calculated and take too much work to really ever deserve or merit pity. But I still find it hard not to pity the terrible, simpering Dear Evan Hansen because it so clearly lays bare its own ghoulishness while drowning any possible complexity in laughable, hollow righteousness and the baffling aesthetic abuse of its lead.
A ludicrous coming-of-age musical about mental health, teen angst and the consuming clout-chasing that dogs our egos, it all starts when Evan Hansen (Ben Platt, who originated the role) pretends to have been friends with fellow student Connor (Colton Ryan, also a veteran of the stage show), who dies by suicide. Connor had stolen Evan’s therapy assignment—a letter to himself—which his parents (Amy Adams, Danny Pino) subsequently found on his body, understanding it to be the last thing he wrote. And since the letter opens with “Dear Evan Hansen,” well…they know just the 27-year-old to call. Evan quits lurching through the school with loudly sung misery, seizing the opportunity for pity and attention. Connor’s death provides the perfect chance for our woebegone hero to gaslight everyone, Connor’s family especially, with a series of escalating lies to make his own life feel a little less empty.
You know the annoying trope where the only reason a plot exists is because an ineffectual character can’t— uh— won’t— quite manage to— oh gosh I simply couldn’t— just get the goddamn truth out? Imagine that being the basis not for avoidable romantic misunderstanding, but for preying on a grieving community. And it’s all painstakingly excused by Evan’s mental illness, explaining away what’s clearly a cold-blooded psychological thriller masquerading as a morbid high school musical. Dear Evan Hansen could easily be recut into a nebbish version of The Guest, where a dead-eyed killer infiltrates not only a high school but a household suffering a terrible loss.
As Evan sings bland emo-pop showtunes about the anxiety that’s kept him “on the outside always looking in,” director Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower) half-heartedly tracks him through hallways and gymnasiums. He isn’t isolated in the frame, set apart only by his singing, nor is he adrift or especially ignored in the sea of teens. With a professional-yet-sleepwalking money gig kind of sheen, Dear Evan Hansen’s aesthetic mostly reads as “bored.” It’s remarkably flat, as absent of effective style as its narrative is of meaningful engagement with its content. Rhythmic jump-cut edits to different angles of Evan’s face nearly play like parodies of something that can actually keep a beat, yet underscore the film’s only concern: Evan, Evan, Evan. Your eyes flee the uncanny fluorescent-lit close-ups to the outskirts of the frame, where overacting extras and Netflix Original staging await them.
While he certainly doesn’t prove that people in their 20s should never play high schoolers, Platt and everything the film does to de-age him is distracting at best and nightmarish at worst. Platt never looks like a high schooler as much as Fred Armison nervously vamping in an “It’s Pat!” wig and pancake make-up so intense Dean Stockwell’s Blue Velvet character would scoff. The closeness and brightness of it all only makes him look more like a Muppet accountant. And Platt, for his part, grimaces through the role like he’s about to rupture something, his ridiculous cartoon vulture hunch highlighting his age rather than masking it. His cloying stare and tic-based acting are too embarrassing and obvious to convey shyness or social anxiety, let alone something more nuanced like attraction to Connor’s sister Zoe (Kaitlyn Dever), whom he seduces.
Oh, right, Evan doesn’t just use Connor’s death for popularity. He ingratiates himself to Connor’s rich parents (who shower him with affection and, nearly, their riches) and romances his sister—let’s be clear, it could only be worse if Evan had killed Connor himself and it was some kind of Taking Lives situation. The worst part of the Zoe-Evan relationship is that it’s instigated through the musical’s creepiest—yet still not most sinister—number, “If I Could Tell Her,” which reconstitutes Evan’s flirtations as things Connor told his best bud that he appreciated about her. If you wanted to see a sweaty incel sing-flirting in that awful “details I just happened to notice” style, its lyrical necromancy inflicted upon a dead kid’s sister, Dear Evan Hansen has you covered. That it’s played straight, even as romantic—with the duo’s song “Only Us,” ostensibly about the basis of their relationship being her dead brother, actually just another chance to assuage poor Evan’s self-esteem—stands out as off-putting and absurd in a film built on off-putting and absurd.
As Evan spends the first two acts pissing on Connor’s grave, you half expect him to rise from his coffin and seek bloody retribution. Tragically, he does not.