Stephen Chbosky | Dear Evan Hansen / 2021

something’s wrong with this picture

by Douglas Messerli

 

Steven Levenson (screenplay), Benj Paske and Justin Paul (music and lyrics), Stephen Chbosky (director) Dear Evan Hansen / 2021

 

Based on a highly successful Off-Broadway and later Broadway musical which won six Tony Awards, the movie version of Dear Evan Hansen was a failure.

    Critics and audiences perceived to major problems. One was the appearance of the film during the COVID-19 pandemic which severely delimited audiences to film and theater performances. But the far greater critical response was the fact, arguably, that the major actor of the workshop and later theater productions of the film, Ben Platt again performing in the title role, was simply too old at the age of 27 to be perceived as a high school student of 17 years of age.

     There is no question that Platt, who understandably wished to perform the character he had so memorable performed on stage, was no longer believable as a teenager, particularly as the film progressed to its later scenes, when he played across the character Zoe (Kaitlyn Dever), although she was also cast against type at age 25.

     Platt sang wonderfully the rather tuneless songs with clever lyrics by Benj Paske and Justin Paul, but simply was unable to convince us in the close-ups, particularly with tears running down his doleful eyes. Yet, just to put this in perspective, Larry Kert the original star of the Broadway musical West Side Story was the very same age in 1957 when he was nominated for a Tony Award, still recognized today as one of the greatest performers of role of Tony. And Richard Beymer, who played the 17-year-old role in the film version of that great high school Romeo and Juliet-based story was 23, the same age as I would have graduated with a college degree had I not run away for a year to New York City. As I have mentioned in another My Queer Cinema essay, James Dean, performing his memorable high school character of Nick Adams was 24 at the time, again the age of a college graduate.

      Platt’s age, I would argue, is not truly the issue. Although the quirky musical about a young man with what is generally described as “social anxiety and depression”—what might today be described as a variation of autism—is a fascinating exploration of the differences many young men and women experience during their teen years, the problem lies with the music and the script.

      To give it credit, Paske’s and Paul’s music is far more complex than what I have often described as the two Broadway standard of musical expression, three notes, alternated with pattern and volume to the fact that there is no where the music intends to move on to (the most obvious example is Wicked) express. Dear Evan Hansen has a full scale of perhaps 8 notes, and its lyrics, particularly in its opening song, “Waving Through a Window,” is quite memorable:

 

I've learned to slam on the brake

Before I even turn the key

Before I make the mistake

Before I lead with the worst of me

 

Give them no reason to stare

No slipping up if you slip away

So I got nothing to share

No, I got nothing to say

 

Step out, step out of the sun

If you keep getting burned

Step out, step out of the sun

Because you've learned, because you've learned

 

On the outside, always looking in

Will I ever be more than I've always been?

'Cause I'm tap, tap, tapping on the glass

I'm waving through a window

I try to speak, but nobody can hear

So I wait around for an answer to appear

While I'm watch, watch, watching people pass

I'm waving through a window, oh

Can anybody see, is anybody waving back at me?

 

    So I can at least give this musical some credit for its far more complex subject matter and the attempt to embody that it both its lyrics and text. 8 notes, however, do not present us with a great sense of melodic joy. I know I exaggerate these musical descriptions, but basically that is what the contemporary Broadway musical offers us; if nothing else, there are no deep arpeggios into complex musical expression such as those offered by generations of composers from Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, Irving Berlin, Frank Loesser, Kurt Weill, Marc Blitzstein, Burton Lane, Leonard Bernstein and so very many others.

     Yet the real problems with this movie (since I did not see the stage musical version, I will not even pretend to discuss what might have been the original difficulties) is that it refuses to fully explore its own premises.

      We feel the deep despair of Evan Hansen “tap, tap, tapping on the glass” that seems to separate him from others. But in the film he basically appears simply as a kind of uncomfortable nerdish person, who feels far more at home with his friend, Jared Kalwani (Nik Dodani), who is described as a “family friend” without any explanation. Is he the son of Evan’s overworked mother, Heidi (Julianne Moore)? And despite their “friendship,” what actually connects these two? Jared even refused to sign the cast Evan has on his arm after falling out of a tree.

     Jared appears to be gay, although we can never quite tell whether he’s simply being cynical or actually expressing a secretive desire when he shares the tidbit at summer camp that he met a beautiful guy who had a body-builder’s physique. I think the “admission” is a joke about how rotten his experiences were in the camp, but still the musical pushes his evidently gay desires forward when he is asked, soon after, to create a “secret” cache of e-mail correspondence between Evan Hansen and his former fellow student Connor Murphy (Colton Ryan) who, almost the moment after he impulsively signs Evan’s arm cast, commits suicide.

    What we don’t know at this point is that Evan himself has fallen from a tree—not at all in Connor’s favorite orchard hideout—in his own attempt a suicide. But the very fact that he has written a letter to himself (encouraged by his psychologist) in an attempt to try to brighten up his day, along with the fact of the signature of Connor so visibly present on his broken arm makes everyone, particularly Connor’s grieving and guilty parents (Danny Pino and Amy Adams), believe that the two boys had a secret relationship.

      Such “secret” relationships have traditionally been expressed in movies and drama, which Jared astutely points out, as gay romances. But since Evan is straight, the movie (and presumably the musical) takes an entire song, despite Jared’s own gay desires and his e-mail tropes and sung almost perversely by the now dead boy, to make it quite clear that Evan is heteronormative and that the “secret” (actually nonexistent) relationship between the two boys was simply that of two male friends.

     Thankfully, perhaps, we don’t have yet another situation in which a young gay man has taken his own life. Vito Russo would have appreciated the attempts of the writers to set the matter straight, that Connor was, in fact, straight, and that his death was a result of drugs, not a hidden love affair.

      But, in fact, the long deconstruction of various possible personal narratives, wherein Jared keeps using homoerotic images which Evan continually attempts to sanitize, makes for a kind of cringe-worthy experience for any gay man since it basically attempts to erase and release Evan Hansen and Connor Murphy from any possible homosexual desires.

     Actually, it might almost have been more interesting if Connor, in Evan’s imagination, had held some secret sexual attraction to him. Surely it might have goosed up the sexual plot, in which we are left only with the quite difficult to believe possibility that one of the school’s most popular cheerleaders, Alana Beck (Amandla Stenberg) is also on the autism scale—it’s nearly impossible to believe that, despite her sing out (“The Anonymous Ones”) that she might be perceived as anything but a kind of gifted schoolgirl, and finally that Connor’s suffering sister had long been attracted to the stuttering apologetic Evan.

    All the kids and adults in this cruel world, so the film tells us, are apparently secretly suffering, and if only we’d get to know them (the people and their problems) we’d comprehend that life isn’t easy. But that is just the issue. The film doesn’t truly allow us to get to know anybody very well. Cynthia Murphy, Connor’s mother seems to be some kind of vegan, gluten-free loving parody, her second husband Larry a selfish, sports-loving empty being whose major gift to his son is a now disintegrating pitcher’s mitt. Their daughter Zoe is a bitter, over-looked suffragette her own brother’s psycho behavior. Evan’s own mother is a terrified woman, who in the song “So Close/So Small” reveals her own fears about become a working mother to support a son and large house after her husband left her.

     The guilt for this entire mess, quite strangely, is put upon Evan for simply wanting to be loved and unable to fully express his own sense of isolation. He lied the film proclaims and so deserves to be punished.

      It might have been easier for all of them, I would argue, if the musical and film had retreated to the terrible cliché that the real problem was that these two boys were gay outsiders, unable to truly express their mutual love. As it is, no one in the entire work really gets to demonstrate their love for one another, except perhaps for Julianne Moore, whose caring refusal of a college grant from Connor Murphy’s family for her son makes it clear that she is determined to look after him without any outside support.

      What it really means is that Evan must put off his college education of a year of hard work and community college courses in order to make enough money to pay his for his education. What it really means is that despite this film’s anthem that “You Will Be Found,” is that you can even fall from the highest branches of a tree and there will be no one there to find you. As Evan finally admits to Jared, when he jumped from the tree, there was no one who came to save him.

       I don’t know, but perhaps Jared had the right idea. Imagine a love affair with a beautiful Brazilian body-builder. Everyone might have been happier if Evan and Connor had been secret gay lovers. Surely it might have explained Connor’s death and Evan’s inability to properly tell his tale. Obviously, however, it would reinforce the idea that being gay is the worst thing possibly facing young boys of 17. I guess the problem was that ten years later Ben Platt had no reason to explain the situation to the expectant audiences. After all, Platt is an openly gay man who married Noah Galvin, who later took over his Evan Hansen role.

 

Los Angeles, February 12, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2025).