Ben Platt

(On Cable TV, May 2022) Good lord, have I loathed a character so thoroughly as I hate Evan Hansen? I didn’t mean to, I swear – I’m an unlikely but indefectible musical fan, and Dear Evan Hansen is not shy about the fact that it’s an adaptation of a Broadway show with characters singing their heart’s desires. But that obnoxious pipsqueak Evan Hansen is something else. From the get-go, he’s showcased as this unbearably neurotic high-schooler with severe anxiety issues that he seems unwilling to fix no matter how he got there. Are we seriously going to spend an hour and a half with this loser as our hero? But wait, it gets worse as the plot mechanics are introduced. From awkward schlub, Hansen (played by Ben Platt, then 27 and looking like it) becomes a serial liar and fabulist pretending to have been the best friend of classmate having killed himself. Caught in a vortex of comforting lies and social media attention, he keeps digging the hole that will inevitably swallow him… and the film asks us to think of him as a poor pitiable victim. Oh my. Hell no. I did like a few things, mind you: the “Sincerely, Me” number is a great use of cinema in illustrating a musical number, and Amandla Stenberg makes a reliably strong impression. But the rest is often unbearable. Dear Evan Hansen strikes me as a film that has already aged very quickly and very poorly – a reflection, perhaps unconscious, of the most annoying trends and pretensions of the late 2010s. But, hey, I’m old and not the target audience for the film – you decide whatever you want to believe.