Review by Zach Dennis
Along the same lines as Where is Anne Frank? and the need for Holocaust education, a better understanding about mental health, especially as experienced by younger people, is an issue that needs to be addressed immediately.
But Dear Evan Hansen is definitely not that answer.
Disclaimer: I have not seen the Broadway version, nor have I listened to those original renditions of the soundtrack. I don’t find that to be all that imperative in assessing this work, but I’m sure others will disagree. That being said, it beguiles me that anyone could find this to be an inspirational tale.
Ben Platt and Kaitlyn Dever in ‘Dear Evan Hansen’
For those like me who are unfamiliar with the story, Dear Evan Hansen follows the titular character (played by Ben Platt) who is tasked with writing letters to himself as an exercise in therapy. Evan struggles with anxiety and depression, and feels like that fabric is ripped apart when an outcast at his high school, Connor, intercepts his letter and keeps it. Evan is afraid that he’ll end up sending it out to the rest of the school and exposing him. Instead, Evan learns that later that day, Connor kills himself and the letter is found on his body and has been interpreted by his parents (played by Amy Adams and Danny Pino) as a suicide note to his only friend: Evan Hansen.
As a way to console this hurting family, Evan constructs a series of these letters between himself and Connor as a way to show a blossoming friendship and that their son was not the angry and unhinged personality that many in school viewed him as. His efforts work, as the family brings him more and more into the world, and Evan gets closer to Connor’s sister, Zoe (Kaitlyn Dever), a person he has had a crush on for a long time. The letters also take a new life among the school and a campaign around mental health awareness becomes a national sensation.
Great, huh? But remember, all of it was a lie.
To call Evan’s path throughout the film as sociopathic would be too kind. It’s one thing to suffer from your own struggles with anxiety and depression; it’s another to gaslight a family into believing that you were friends with their son who committed suicide – all under the guise that you’d love to sleep with his sister and have a family of your own because your working class, single mom can’t be around as much as you’d like because she’s having to work more to pay bills.
Ben Platt and Nik Dodani in ‘Dear Evan Hansen’
That’s not even engaging with the fact that, as countless others have pointed out before, Ben Platt looks like a 35-year-old man going to high school. This clear dissonance between his age and the age of his other classmates creates this almost Cronenberg-esque spectacle of body horror as he continues to masquerade as a person who cares about this dead teenager when actually the whole thing was constructed through his anxiety-soaked narcissism to get with the girl.
There’s something sinister there, looking back at the course of film history and large age gaps between romantic leads, when you see Platt and Dever together. In a way, this almost tears down the facade that this is something normal and engages on a more real level that this clearly older man is pretending to be a young person to sleep with this teenager.
Regardless of the overall message, Dear Evan Hansen is the work of people in need of serious help. There is no education towards understanding other people’s interior lives here. Instead, it shows the sociopathic tendencies of a leading man who got the role from his executive producer father, who understands mental health about as well as he understands the need to step away from a role for the good of the project.