Dear Evan Hansen (2021)
People say that film is a visual medium like that’s a neutral statement and not an indictment. In practice, it’s often as grim a business as one can think of. The first step in most cases is finding a beautiful person and deciding how ugly they should appear. If they’re playing millionaires and spies, they generally look like themselves, made more glamorous with nice makeup and evening wear. If they are playing the common man, so to speak, that’s when the wigs and prosthetics come out. It says something about the medium and how we’ve let it develop that, with a world full of people that look all sorts of ways, this is how films carry on.
This practice runs in curious tension with two other principles. One principle is that the purpose of film should be to expand our understanding. (Empathy might be assumed to be included in that prospect. But let’s move on for the moment.) The other is the ancient one that looks denote morality. The worse you look, the more evil you are.
“Dear Evan Hansen” is a fairly evil film. But the way it negotiates these principles still mesmerizes. I’m fascinated by its subterfuges: by what it says it’s doing, what it’s actually doing, and what, in heaven’s name, the filmmakers think they’re doing.
To write about “Dear Evan Hansen” is to catalogue its lies while speculating why it may have told them. All its lies congregate on the character, the performance, and the screen presence of its star. First, we have to deal with Ben Platt. Ben Platt is a pleasant-looking man who made a transformation for the film. The stated reason he underwent these changes was to look teenage. But the effect is that Evan Hansen is grotesque. To be clear, it’s not just that Platt lost weight or whatever. The camera takes sadistic measures. The number of close-ups in harsh lighting is absurd. Platt is filmed at angles you’d never see in, say, a Julia Roberts movie. A go-pro up his nose would have been a flattery. And finally, there is Platt’s performance, which in moments of dramatic import seems to crunch and bloat his every feature like he is wearing a fit-bit that measures how far away you travel from your resting face. The effect, plastered on the already callous medium of film, certainly feels like an accomplishment of something. But what that is escapes me.
What the film is trying to do, or accomplishing, with Evan’s face feels important, because Evan is a bad person. This is annoying, because a movie about a good person who looks like this might very well be something. It’s also annoying because every character Evan reminds me of, from Tom Ripley (Matt Damon) in “Talented Mr. Ripley,” to Phillip (Farley Granger) in “Rope,” was on the beautiful side of ordinary, in movies about the dangers of men whose looks and perceived station almost let them get away with it, a tradition “Dear Evan Hansen” could have joined.
I’ve read that Evan Hansen should have been played by a real teen, or by an adult more convincing as a teen, because that would have made him more sympathetic. But I think the effect, assuming the teen was the pleasant-looking kind we’re used to seeing, would have simply made his resemblance to the characters named above — insecure liars who are capable of shocking actions — more obvious.
(Considering the examples which I’ve named, there probably is an essay to be written about “DEH”’s frankly bizarre relationship to queerness. But I don’t have the forks to stab myself into writing it.)
The primary idea of “Dear Evan Hansen” is that Evan’s behavior is forgivable because of his mental illness. This feels absurd on its face, doubling the absurd faces on display. In those moments, when the film is really pushing that way, you wonder if they know they are making a film. When Evan Hansen looks at his mother with dark, unkind eyes, you want to shout, “Excuse me, but we can see you!” When you watch him cry big, horrible tears, you want to say, “We were 20 inches from your mug when the thought of doing the right thing caused your energy to recoil into your body, where you retrieved the self-serving thing from somewhere in your sinuses.”
In that way, film as a medium is like the meanest kid in school: obsessed with looks, and capable of the most devastating truths.
I assume there are two types of people “Dear Evan Hanson” can convince of its argument; that is, that it’s okay that Evan Hansen acts atrociously because he is anxious and depressed, and that by simply stopping at a certain point, in order to act badly in a subtler way, he deserves a happy ending. These are people who have decided needing pills means you are a bad person, and people who hope they will be forgiven for their actions by any means necessary, including the fact that they take pills.
Perhaps there was a better film to be shot inside the character’s body. I’d love to know how the pills grew and changed as people, being ingested by one of the most harshly photographed characters in all of film.
