Directing: B-
Acting: B+
Writing: C-
Cinematography: B-
Editing: C+
Music: A-

Dear Evan Hansen is the perfect movie for people with no critical thinking skills. Anyone who sees this movie and then wonders how the Broadway play on which it’s based was a huge success has evidently never met your average mainstream audience. People want to be entertained, and hear great music, and to be moved to tears, and this movie offers all of those things. I mean, I cried too.

So what’s the problem? Well, nothing, if you have no interest in looking beyond superficial concerns. I guess I won’t begrudge you that, if it’s the choice you make. More power to you, I guess. But while the characters in this story are supposedly working through their grief and learning to conquer their anxieties, it's all based on an endless cascade of lies, and people doing what are bizarrely never quite presented as such but are objectively horrible things to each other. One would not be too far off the mark to call this movie unhinged.

Except, it's never presented that way, nor does it ever really feel that way. You only get there when you stop to think critically about what's going on. In the meantime, you're being moved by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul's original music and wowed by Ben Platt's voice.

But, okay, let's back up a little and talk about Ben Platt, because there are actually a lot of criticisms of this movie that I feel are unfair. As in, although Platt originated the title role of a 16-year-old when he himself was 21, he still plays the same role in the film adaptation at the age of 27. To that I say, who cares? If we can literally celebrate 32-year-olds playing middle schoolers in the Hulu series Pen15, why is this such a big deal? People are acting like Ben Platt as a "grown man" in this film is outrageous casting, and I did not find it the least bit distracting. Furthermore, Kaitlyn Dever as Evan's love interest Zoe is 24 years old in the part herself, and that fact is getting far less press.

Honestly, the performances matter far more to me than the actual ages of the actors, as long as they're still young. (Although to be fair, in the hands of the right director, even someone far older in the part could have worked. It's all in the handling.) And while some are saying Platt is overdoing his performance, the character of Evan is someone I relate to on a viscerally personal level. So much of his high school experience, his social anxieties, brought me right back to my own remarkably similar experiences at the same age. He takes many medications for these things, as does at least one other student he gets to know a little, and I found myself wondering what medications I might have been given had I been born twenty years later.

Well, maybe none. Evan's disorders are often manifest in very physiological ways, and my own problems in my youth, rooted in childhood traumas, were better served with therapy than with medication. And this actually is relevant to the film, because that brings me to the other truly legitimate criticism of Dear Evan Hansen, which is how it characterizes mental illness. Every "breakthrough" Evan makes is as a result of bizarrely fated circumstances, and his use of medication is presented as one of the many things that otherize him rather than as a genuine solution to any of his struggles.

Then there's Connor. I haven't even mentioned him yet! He's the emotionally unstable classmate who committed suicide after randomly signing the cast on Evan's arm, with a letter Evan wrote to himself still on his person after he snatched it from a school printer Evan printed it to. It convinces Connor's parents (Amy Adams and Danny Pino, both great in what are ultimately thankless parts) that Connor had friends after all, and in his social panic Evan goes along with their assumptions, creating a fantasy relationship he had with Connor to make Cynthia and Larry feel better in their grief.

And I kept thinking about Connor, over and over, through the vast majority of Dear Evan Hansen—he's the character completely swept aside, in favor of some fantasy construction of him. With hints of his true personality sprinkled in here and there, perhaps director Stephen Chbosky felt that we were given a full picture of who he really was. But, Connor is really given the shaft here, all the "real" details about him amounting to nothing more than a ghost, in favor of an exponentially larger amount of time spent on the fiction of him. Evan convinces Connor’s parents that he had some secret life of fulfilling friendship, that he was capable of real connection with his peers. Except we never see that actually happen, because it all exists as a deceitful construction built by Evan. The closest we ever get is a brief home video of Connor singing and playing guitar. But, as far as we know, Connor really was the awful shit he seemed to be in the few scenes we see of him when he was still alive. Either way, Connor is never given fair representation in this movie.

And sure, the movie is about Evan rather than Connor, except Evan uses Connor to make it so, and in the process quite elaborately emotionally manipulates an entire family. Evan's own single mother is played by Julianne Moore, easily the best thing in this movie, unfortunately absent too much of the time because she is an overworked nurse constantly taking on extra shifts. She even gets one song near the end, and it's a moment at which tissues should be handy.

I do have to wonder, would Dear Evan Hansen work even as well as it does if it were not a musical? An odd thing to ponder, because you wouldn't expect people breaking out into song about anxiety and grief to make it better—but, it really does. The songs are wonderful, and almost certainly are the reason the Broadway play was so successful. Watch this movie and then try imagining the exact same story as a non-musical stage play. You'd be ready to slit your own wrists by the end of it. As it is, the music serves a dual purpose of keeping you engaged with the story, while also distracting you from how truly fucked up the premise is. As long as you give in to that distraction, you might leave with the delusion that this movie is actually great.

*Connor has good reason to be pissed, I’m on his side!*

Overall: C+