'Dear Evan Hansen': The Play earned tons of praise, won a half dozen Tonys and turned Ben Platt into a Broadway star. 'Dear Evan Hansen': The Movie has generated nothing but hate. What happened?
Dear Evan HansenIt’s a question worth asking, especially once you see the film and realize that so much of Platt’s performance not only replicates what he did onstage, it continues to ring true to the source material. No, the close-ups do not exactly obscure the fact that Platt is not an adolescent. There are moments when the actor doesn’t seem to have received the memo that playing to the stalls and playing to the camera are two separate things.
But it’s Platt’s nervous energy, his naked lack of comfort in his own skin, those aforementioned “hunched shoulders” and his strained neck — he’s like a turtle trying to force his way out of a shell — that gets you through the first act’s rough patches and exposition dumps. The setup is the same: Evan writes himself a note of self-affirmation, which is intercepted by Connor Murphy .
This is the moment in the story where you either find our hero sympathetic or borderline sociopathic, and where Platt’s portrayal of a stammering, emotionally needy 17-year-old becomes your ticket into the narrative or a complete deal-breaker.
And then, out of the blue, “Sincerely, Me” shows up, and it’s as if the movie suddenly kicks into gear. It’s not just that the showstopping number offers a shaft of light in the darkness, or even that the imagined friendship between Evan and Connor is turned into a resetting song-and-dance routine, with Jared injecting Statler & Waldorf-style commentary into the revelry. It’s thatremembers how screen musicals work, and that it is one.
From there, the movie finds a far steadier footing, and even when some other numbers don’t hit the heights you want them to , the course correction begins to work wonders.
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