Dear Evan Hansen is a misfire on just about every level
Into the emotional uncanny valley goes this maudlin adaptation of a beloved Broadway musical
Film Reviews Dear Evan Hansen
As Ben Platt’s captivating performance in Netflix’s The Politician proved, there are times when casting a twentysomething as a teenager isn’t particularly distracting. The heightened worlds of darkly comedic satire and soapy high-school romance make it easy enough to roll with unrealistic casting choices—and that goes for stage musicals, too, where some level of artifice is built into the format. Unfortunately, one place where age-appropriate casting is kind of necessary is in an intimate teen drama that hinges entirely on the raw-nerve energy of its youthful lead to sell his character’s manipulative, cruel, selfish behavior as sympathetic rather than horrifying. While the filmmakers behind Dear Evan Hansen have maintained that their biggest motivation for adapting the popular Broadway musical was to immortalize Platt’s Tony-winning titular performance, what they’ve actually done by having the 27-year-old play a high school senior is highlight the stage show’s cavernous weaknesses while failing to transport just about any of its strengths to the new medium.
Now, could the film have been saved by casting an actual teen in the lead role? (Or at least by giving Platt a less distractingly desperate-to-look-young haircut?) It’s unclear. Questions of bad taste have hung around Dear Evan Hansen since it debuted on Broadway in 2016, though such qualms were mostly drowned out by praise for Platt’s visceral live performance and the catchy Broadway-by-way-of-Christian-rock tunes from wunderkind songwriters Benj Pasek and Justin Paul (who are also responsible for the toe-tapping numbers from The Greatest Showman). Like Rent before it, Dear Evan Hansen became an instant crossover sensation with young people. And as with Rent, perhaps that bubble was always going to burst sometime. It just didn’t have to burst in such a catastrophic way, via an adaptation that’s alternately baffling and cringeworthy, with only the occasional emotional highpoint for balance.
In giving Dear Evan Hansen the tone of a grounded indie drama, director Stephen Chbosky (The Perks Of Being A Wallflower) has lost the hook of seeing everyday suburban problems heightened to operatic musical theater proportions. All that’s left is a convoluted narrative that doesn’t feel like it particularly wants or needs to be a musical at all—the story of how socially anxious teen Evan Hansen (Platt) winds up posing, accidentally at first, as the best friend of Connor Murphy (Colton Ryan), a troubled school outcast who dies by suicide near the start of the film. The misunderstanding hinges on a contrived device: a letter that Evan writes himself as a therapy exercise, which falls into Connor’s hands and is subsequently mistaken for a suicide note.
Evan first passively encourages the lie that he and the deceased were close in order to bring peace to Connor’s devastated parents (Amy Adams and Danny Pino) and to their teenage daughter, Zoe (Kaitlyn Dever). But his manipulations become more active as the wealthy, supportive Murphy family start to offer him the sort of picture-perfect suburban life he’s never had with his hardworking single mom (Julianne Moore). Soon enough, Evan is faking elaborate email correspondence between himself and Connor, and turning his fake grief into viral fame with a memorial speech that becomes an internet rallying cry for mental health and suicide prevention. And Evan finds even less incentive to stop lying when Zoe, his lifelong crush, starts to return his affections the more time they spend together.
To be fair, Dear Evan Hansen knows that Evan is in the wrong—and so does Evan himself, who’s racked with guilt for most of the interminable 137-minute runtime. The problem is that the film doesn’t understand just how much he’s in the wrong, as it takes an uncomfortable “have it both ways” stance. We know Evan’s memorial speech is bogus, yet we’re still supposed to be swept up in his performance of “You Will Be Found,” a generically uplifting anthem about reaching out to others in times of need. In one painfully maudlin montage, thousands of comments flood the internet, praising the way Evan’s speech and Connor’s story saved their lives. So is the argument that all that social good justifies Evan’s manipulative means? Or is the film critiquing the way we all glom onto strangers’ tragedies in order to make ourselves feel like we’re part of something? And then there’s the way Evan gets close to Zoe by spinning stories about how much her brother idolized her, even as she describes her brother as a monster whose constant emotional abuse made her life a living hell—a dissonance the movie acknowledges and then does absolutely nothing with because it’s ultimately far more interested in Evan than Zoe.
It’s a shame, because in the brief instances when Dear Evan Hansen does work, it’s largely thanks to its talented female ensemble. Kaitlyn Dever is so effortlessly naturalistic as a grief-stricken teen that she almost makes the case that this should’ve been a gender-flipped adaptation starring her. Amy Adams finds some compelling moments of desperation beneath her character’s sunny suburban positivity. And Julianne Moore steals the film with her beautifully restrained performance of the 11 o’clock number “So Big/So Small,” a maternal love ballad that’s the one time Chbosky’s minimalist musical staging actually pays off. Elsewhere, the director struggles to jazz up his stilted blocking with clumsy montage cutaways, which are only effective in the upbeat, darkly funny number “Sincerely, Me,” in which Evan dreams up a dance-filled fantasy of his fake friendship with Connor.
Indeed, despite the heaviness of its subject matter, Dear Evan Hansen could’ve used more moments of lightness. The few times Platt’s performance actually works are when he leans into the more comedic, confident side of Evan—mostly because those are when Platt feels like he’s playing an actual character rather than just his character’s neuroses. For the most part, however, his hunched, twitchy, wide-eyed take doesn’t seem like a believable portrait of social awkwardness so much as just a forced, awkward performance. The smaller, more internal Platt tries to go, the bigger and more out of place he looks. To sell a story this troubling, you need a lead with enough charisma to paper over the flaws. And despite Platt’s impressive vocals, the magic he brought to his stage performance (and to so much of his previous screen work) is nowhere to be found here. Relatable in neither its bizarrely specific plotting nor its broadly generic emotions, Dear Evan Hansen is so self-serious that it almost plays like self-parody, only without any “so bad it’s good” fun. We may all be striving for human connection right now, but we’re unlikely to find any here.
289 Comments
Oh come on it’s at least an F-, if not a G. These grades are too generous
I’m fully convinced that the grades are meaningless and have the teeth of a 90 year old candy tester. Its basically whatever any given writer feels like grading, which is a shit metric.
Dear Evan Hansen in D Minor
That’s statutory
Okay, now I see why
Any lower and people might mistake it for being worthy of hate-watching. The way one would possibly watch Cats while on enough recreational drugs. This grade screams “waste of money,” and “don’t bother.”
“It just didn’t have to burst in such a catastrophic way, via an adaptation that’s alternately baffling and cringeworthy, with only the occasional emotional highpoint for balance.”
Honest question: Is there really any other way?
I mean, Dear Evan Hanson plus Rent plus Cats…seems to me that over-the-top, poorly-thought-out film adaptation is generally what happens to HUGE broadway shows, isn’t it?
I don’t think actors *have* to be the exact age, but they have to at least act like a normal kid does and Evan just doesn’t give me that vibe.
Tom Holland’s is a mid to late 20 something and I buy that he’s a 17 year old.
Yeah, he knows how to act like a kid, especially an awkward one. Platt comes off as a fairly confident person who can’t quite relate to who Evan is, at least on film, until he becomes the confident monster post-fame. I am intrigued by the idea that Connor was not a great guy however, and the implications of lionizing such a person just because he died are fascinating.
The way Platt carries himself in the role makes it look like a greatly cynical—bordering on contemptuous—take on an anxiety-ridden, unsociable teenager character.
He’s 25 and he was only 19 when he filmed his Civil War scenes so yeah, he played a teenager on screen as a teen (albeit, briefly) which leads to his credibility.
Around %80 of the actors in “13 Reasons Why” looked like late teenagers because the cast was so large, but since this doesn’t have the same wide cast and multiple distracting and absurd storylines, it’s concentrated weirdness.
I had a good laugh when that rapist dude goes into a convenience store to buy alcohol and the cashier asks for his ID. This dude looked 30.
so it’s like 21 Jump Street the musical, only instead of a narc it’s an emotional vampire?
Nah, that’s Evie Russell:
This review makes it seem like the review should have been pushed into a D+, where the best parts still don’t make the endeavor of watching it worth it, and not interesting enough of a failure to enjoy.
Yeah, this has Gentleman’s F written all over it.
Gentlemanteen’s F
I award this movie Ten Foul Bananas.
He unintentionally looks like Jack.
Robin played a kid fairly convincingly. Platt just seems to be trying too hard with what he thinks is nerdy loner quirks, which the review reinforces for me.
You are correct. I’m saying Platt doesn’t have that. He unintentionally looks like an old man playing a kid. I wasn’t clear.
Obligatory reminder that Francis Ford Coppola directed and produced Jack.
It’s one of his best is what you’re saying?
It’s no Captain Io.
And that Bill Cosby was Jack’s moral center. Hell, he was all millennials’ moral center in the 90’s, along with Rosie O’Donnell and Whoopi Goldberg.
US millennials, perhaps. In the UK we had, I dunno, the Honey Monster?
Not to be confused wirh Tropic Thunder’s ‘Simple Jack’.( although Simple Jack is part Jack , part Forest Gump , all R****d)
Platt be jackin’ Robbie’s style and his movie plots (World’s Greatest Dad)!
Someone mentioned that movie in another comment and now this movie is even more weird. It’s not easy to adapt Broadway shows to traditional movies.
More like, “Dear Evan Hansen: your movie sucks!”, AMIRITE?
If anyone is interested in a movie with a similar premise (fake suicide note suddenly brings notoriety and possibly happiness to the protagonist) that realizes that premise should actually be a pitch black comedy, check out World’s Greatest Dad.
Yeah there’s no way to frame this premise as a Feel Good Musical.
I mean it’s a hugely popular and successful broadway musical, so there clearly is a way. It just didn’t translate well into a feature
Dear Evan Hansen works on Broadway about as well as Green Book works in theaters, which is to say that a whole lot of people loved it and it won awards and accolades and a whole lot of other people have been calling it baffling morally-bankrupt trash from the beginning.
I dunno, the original off-Broadway production never really got that reaction. It was only when it really became a success that all the “actually…” opinions started being made public. I do think the stylized staging (and even writing) of the film helps make a lot of that more palatable.
I dunno, the original off-Broadway production never really got that
reaction. It was only when it really became a success that all the
“actually…” opinions started being made public.
That’s typically how it works though. The broader the audience consuming media the more likely it’s going to start hitting people the wrong way.“Off-broadway” gets away with more because the audience consuming it is smaller. It’s less likely to get noticed by people so stuff will slip under the radar.But once you hit Broadway, there’s more people hearing about it and watching it. And, by that same token, Broadway is trying to promote the film to a wider audience by bringing it to a bigger stage.Same thing here: They’re bringing the play to a broader audience by putting it out as a movie. Something easier for audiences to get to and consume than a stage show.
Meaning more people are going to start seeing the content and going “Hey wait a minute…”It’s the same reason someone’s bad tweets from years ago don’t “suddenly become a problem” until they make it big. Because back then they said stupid stuff but their audience was small enough that it either slipped by or no one said anything.But then they got pushed in front of a bigger audience, that audience wanted to learn more about the person…and oh hey there they are 2-3 years before they made it big talking about how maybe Hitler had some good ideas.
I dunno, I saw the touring company and it was convincing. I don’t quite agree that there were no negative ramifications coming out of his deception or that it was portrayed as if all was well in the end, no harm no foul, like it was Wedding Crashers. The musical was definitely empathetic to Hansen while making it clear that what he was doing was still wrong, but I thought it was convincing in showing him to be this person who got in too deep because he didn’t spill the truth before things got out of control.
Like, exactly this. The show is so obviously saying “he let things spin out of control and eventually suffers consequences for it” that all these “he’s a monster! this show is irresponsible!” takes are clearly by people who didn’t actually see the show.It would be like complaining about the moral turpitude of an ‘80s sitcom episode where a little white lie leads to escalating complications and a final embarrassing collapse.
That’s clearly what it goes for.Whether it actually gets there depends on the viewer and the production. The way Evan integrates himself into the family (especially with the sister) doesn’t feel entirely like an accident in the original show, and the eventual fallout seems more eager to forgive his transgressions than some of the audience might be.It’s obvious that it wants to be Three’s Company, But Serious And With A Teenage Suicide, but that’s a really tough tone to balance, so it’s not surprising that it fails for some people.
Unfortunately, a lot of critics have realised all they need to do to get paid is to point at anything more complicated than a nursery rhyme and say “it takes an uncomfortable ‘have it both ways’ stance”, and pretend to be confused about what its “argument” is – is its argument X, or Opposite of X!? Which could it be!? On the one hand it shows this, but on the other hand it shows that – so by definition it’s a failure! Art must only have one hand!
“On the Only Hand” would be a good title for something.
I canmot possibly overstate just how insanely fucking stupid this comment is. Holy shit, is it amazingly dumb.
Gee, then it’s awfully strange that so many critics who obviously have indeed watched the movie are lobbing the exact same criticisms. Odd, if that criticism is supposedly borne of not knowing the full story. Feel free to explain how that works.
Yes, but we have a curious tendency in film circles to assume the latter are somehow more correct
The love Rent gets is pretty similar. It’s a play that celebrates a bunch of people who refuse to get paying jobs and are continually mooching off free housing from their friend.
You’re falsely applying the current internet narrative around it to the past. “A whole lot of other people” did not have the reaction when it originally premiered on Broadway, I’m sure a few people did of course, but it was a blockbuster in terms of sales, it had a relatively large (for broadway) pop culture impact, its songs streamed big numbers online, it swept the tony’s with little to no backlash, and it was generally considered a beloved new school musical. Also, Green Book is a false comparison because you will have a hard time finding anyone who says Green Book is their favorite movie, while TONS of younger and newer-to-broadway folks would list Dear Evan Hansen as their favorite musical. There’s a genuine passion for it that isn’t there with Green Book
Fair enough, I suppose a better point of comparison might be Garden State. It captured a weird zeitgeist, but the more time passes and the audience expands, the more its reputation tanks.
I definitely think the Garden State comparison is far far more fitting.
Right down to both of them managing to paper over their own issues for a couple years with their soundtracks. Yeah, I’m much more comfortable with this comparison.
THIS. The idea that this treacly garbage — with Platt playing the character as autistic to a degree — won Tonys over Come From Away or The Great Comet of 1812 was asinine then, and it’s asinine now.
Those are definitely two superior musicals!
I think this one is more about catharsis than Feel Good. The big number You Will Be Found is so emotional because in a moment of intense pain, Evan actually wasn’t found. He was alone in the moment he’s singing about. It’s kind of an Instagram vs Reality study on grief which is weird, but this is a weird, weird time. Especially for teens. Live, it really feels like a group cry. That is extremely difficult to pull off in a movie. Nor do I particularly want that experience from a movie.
I do agree, “Feel Good” isn’t the phrase I would actually use to describe DEH and I was only saying it to retort the other person’s point. You’re right that “Cathartic” fits it much more; it’s definitely designed to be a tear-jerker / life-affirmer
I mean, Cats was also “successful” – when I finally saw Dear Evan Hansen, it’s like it gave me New reasons to hate musicals
Youre acting as if the musical was universally acclaimed, and that is absolutely not the case. A very significant percentage of people found the play to be just as tasteless, crass, and questionable as the movie.
World’s Greatest Dad is awesome. Probably my favorite Robin Williams movie.
Yeah its definitely my favorite Williams performance. Its some of his best dramatic AND comedic work, but much lower key than his usual performances in either kind of role. And the pure joy and relief he exudes at the end is one of the most cathartic movie moments I have ever seen after 90 minutes of making the audience squirm.
Or part of charcoal-black comedy Heathers.“I loved my son. My dead, gay son.”
Yeah , reading the description it looked like the musical took that movie as a starting point and went with it.Also I’d take a pitch black comedy over even a pitch perfect musical anyday.
Ugh, really? In that case, before I do
What? WHAT?! Having only heard the soundtrack, all I know about the plot is what I’ve read on Wikipedia. If this is true… ooh… no…
RP1 and DEH deserve each other.
Does he read it out loud? Like, the whole thing? Because that would explain why the movie runs over 2 hours.
It’s because that’s what they think nerds read!
The only way this gets better (worse) is if RP2 references this.
I liked it better when it was called “World’s Greatest Dad.”
I think you guys are harping way too much on Ben Platt’s age. It’s common practice to cast adults to play teenagers, mostly due to child labor laws during filming. Watching the trailer, really no one other than Evan’s dorky friend and Zoe look remotely age-appropriate. I’ve mentioned it before, but there’s a clip in the trailer featuring a locker room full of body builders, which just doesn’t exist in real life, but is normal in Hollywood casting. Sure, Platt may have been cast to recreate his Broadway performance, which may make the difference more stark-looking, but you could apply the age critique to 90% of the rest of the youth cast, so why can you not let HIS looks go? I understand if his performance sucks, but there are some things you just have to accept under the banner of suspending disbelief. Hell, Daniel Kaluuya, age 32, just won an Oscar for playing Fred Hampton, who died at 21. There is no universe where Kaluuya looks like he could pass for 21, but no one cared, and his performance was fucking brilliant. Now, if you’re saying that a low quality performance draws more attention to the age disparity, that’s one thing, but that’s not what I’ve been reading from you guys since the trailer premiered (apologies if I’ve inferred something that isn’t there). It’s basically just been, “How dare you cast a 27-year-old to play a teenager?” which sort of feels like a fait accompli where the AV Club as a whole decided well in advance that they were going to hate this. Now, it may actually suck, I haven’t seen it yet, but the obsession with Platt’s age makes it feel like this review was pre-determined.
“Now, if you’re saying that a low quality performance draws more attention to the age disparity, that’s one thing, but that’s not what I’ve been reading from you guys since the trailer premiered (apologies if I’ve inferred something that isn’t there).”I think that’s actually EXACTLY what they’re saying.
Yeah. This is the point of the review.
“[O]ne place where age-appropriate casting is kind of necessary is in an intimate teen drama…. [W]hat they’ve actually done by having the 27-year-old play a high school senior is highlight the stage show’s cavernous weaknesses.” It’s subtle, and you really have to read between the lines, but I agree.
If by subtle you mean “explicitly spelled out multiple times,” then yes.
The critiques I’ve read also say the *role* draws attention to the disparity, ie, if we can’t squint and imagine he’s ~16 and naive, he just seems like some kind of sociopath.
I think it’s actually saying the inverse, that the age disparity exacerbates the performance’s flaws (as well as the writing’s, mainly the idea that the core premise could be a “youthful indiscretion”).
I don’t know, I watch a lot of shows and movies where people in their late 20’s are playing teenagers and even from the trailer something about Platt here felt extra off? I think the deliberate attempts to make him look younger ended up making him look older than he actually is in a way that just leaving it alone wouldn’t have.
Agreed. I saw a trailer for this and he stuck out so much I pointed it out to my wife, and she thought he did too.
Personally, I think it’s his eyebrows. Those are old man eyebrows.
(From Schmigadoon)Kevin: She’s looks a lot older than she isCindy: Haven’t you ever seen Sound of Music? Liesel is 16 going on 29
I think Caroline’s review does point out the distinction: “one place where age-appropriate casting is kind of necessary is in an intimate teen drama that hinges entirely on the raw-nerve energy of its youthful lead to sell his character’s manipulative, cruel, selfish behavior as sympathetic rather than horrifying.” I haven’t seen Judas And The Black Messiah but I’m assuming the plot doesn’t intend us to see Hampton as a raw, vulnerable adolescent, the way this review suggests Dear Evan Hansen wants us to see the title character. (Also, there’s a tried-and-true history of biopics playing pretty loose with characters’ ages, chronology, and other factors in order to sell the story better.) I agree the coverage of this has sometimes felt a little too “my god, he’s 27 years old!”, but I can also imagine why his casting might not work because of that fact.
I agree with you in large part, but it does feel like they started with the ending and then went looking for the beginning, a conclusion looking for a thesis, if you will. From the start it was “Oh God, he’s not a teenager,” and then they went backwards looking for a reason to justify the opinion. Maybe it’s just me, but that’s what it felt like. And while there’s much more of a cavalier attitude with looks in biopics than in musicals, I don’t think that sets a retroactive standard that the latter should have more of a sense of verisimilitude. I mean, as we saw with “Cats,” trying to make the actors look like the characters is its own minefield.And like I said, if Platt’s performance sucks, then it sucks, but that should be the focus, not whether or not he “looks the part,” when it’s a part he made famous in the first place.
Having actually seen this, I can confirm that Ben Platt’s age hits early and often.
It’s the exact same problem as the Rent movie adaptation, where the issue isn’t merely that the actors look older than the characters they’re portraying, it’s that they look too old to be behaving the way they are. Ben Platt absolutely, positively does not convince as a teenager who gets swept up in a crisis beyond his control due to his own naivety – he reads as a selfish man who realizes too late how many people he’s completely taken advantage of.In other words: you’re right, plenty of movies cast teenagers older. There’s a reason this particular movie is getting crap for its execution of that when others get away with it. It’s not just arbitrary bitching.
I’ve only seen the Rent movie and I think the age of the actors is what made me really not like it. They seemed like a bunch of attention-seeking children who are gentrifying a city, and the bag lady is the only one with any sense.
I mean Rent kinda plays that way now on stage too for a variety of reasons (I swear it didn’t back in the late 90s–but I was a teen…) But you’re not wrong–the two things wrong with the Rent movie are the things wrong here (even if I think Rent has better source material)–using any of the original cast despite how they have aged and look on film, and a poor choice of director (how Chris Columbus’ campaigning to get to direct Rent actually worked, is beyond me.) Columbus choosing to make everything, like the lofts they are essentially squatting in, look downright glamorous also doesn’t help.
Yes it was staged and shot beautifully, but there was also a coldness to everything—as easy as it was to get emotional watching it on stage, the movie version left me passively enjoying the music and vocals but not much else. Set piece after set piece, rather than a flowing story which grabs you.
Part of the issue is that with a good movie you can ignore the flaws, but in a bad movie you dwell on them more.
that should be the focus, not whether or not he “looks the part,” when it’s a part he made famous in the first place.
It’s a part he made famous when he was younger, surrounded by a supporting cast that matched his age, from much further away and in a much more abstract environment.Even in the best of circumstances (and this definitely ain’t that), a 22 year old playing a teenager on stage with abstract sets is very different from a 27 year old playing a teenager on camera in a high school.
A 27 year old playing a teenager on camera in a high school while slathered in vaudeville pancake makeup topped with a truly bizarre fright wig, no less.
It is indeed just you, as you appear to not be the brightest bulb…
Yes I’ve read other reviews that make the same point; while casting older actors to play teens is standard practice in the movie industry in this particular movie it just doesn’t work.
Not Fred Hampton, but William O’Neil. He’s supposed to be a teen at the beginning, and it’s been too long since Lakeith Stanfield played one in Short Term 12. I don’t think it ruined the movie though.
No but Judas and the Black Messiah does suffer for casting LaKeith Stanfield to play a 19 year old (albeit one who bears a striking resemblance to him). It changes the story if we’re talking about the FBI recruiting a teenager to spy on Hampton for them vs. a man in his late thirties. The FBI would come off as more predatory if the casting was age appropriate.
I think Caroline’s review does point out the distinction:“one place where age-appropriate casting is kind of necessary is in an intimate teen drama that hinges entirely on the raw-nerve energy of its youthful lead to sell his character’s manipulative, cruel, selfish behavior as sympathetic rather than horrifying.” I think you’re right that this is really the key.
The Birdcage has a similar problem. Dan Futterman as the son, Val, was 29 playing a 21 year old, but that’s a BIG 8 years. Val comes across as so self-obsessed and unconcerned with the pain his actions are causing that he seems actively cruel, where someone less mature-looking could sell it as desperation and “the callousness of youth”.
He also looks like a child-molester next to Calista Flockhart, who is actually three years older than him but looks like a baby in that movie.
And it’s not as if there wasn’t an ACTUAL teenager who played the role on Broadway. Andrew Barth Feldman (no relation to me) was cast at age 16 and played the role in New York for about a year, after he won the Jimmy Award (National High School Musical Theater Award), and still did schoolwork, etc. And from what I read, it seemed like he got rave reviews as well.
It’s not that he’s 27, it that he looks old as fuck. Kaitlyn Denver’s 24, and she’s positively baby-faced next to him. How anyone thought that doing… that to his hair would be a good idea is beyond me.
Reminds me of all the great Jillian Bell scenes with Jonah Hill in 22 Jump Street. “When you were a senior in high school and my dad was a freshman, at the same school…did you bully him?”
I was gonna say, that dude looks older than he is anyway. He just has that kind of face. Not his fault, but certainly doesn’t help.
I didn’t realize he was only 27 until reading this review. Whoever styled him managed to make him look like a 45 year old who is attempting to look like a teen.
Honestly, the first thing that hair brings to mind is Peter MacNicol in Addams Family Values. The second thing it brings to mind is a middle-aged man cosplaying as George Michael Bluth.Neither of these comparisons is meant to be complimentary.
Michael Cera can conjure up the halting, awkward persona of a troubled teen so well–if he could sing, I would have preferred him in this production.
*George Maharis Bluth*
Looks like they were trying to get that Michael Cera youthfulness. Woops.
Wait that dude is only 27 years old. I thought he was in his mid to late 30s but looked old for that age.
It’s because he’s lost a ton of weight and looks like a hollowed out old man.
That hair looks like someone thinks Michael Cera is the hottest teenager around. Or maybe Jon Arbuckle.
Yeah – just like Russ Tamblyn, who was 26 at the time, didn’t look like a teenager to me in the 1961 version of West Side Story (not that most of the cast of that movie REALLY looked like teenagers, but to me Tamblyn in particular looked too old for the part).
But he looks older than me, and I’m 50.
The Ian Ziering effect.
Gabrielle Carteris was collecting social security when she did 90210!
I haven’t seen it and I’m not going to, but the TIFF review also mentioned the age and brought up your point about how age isn’t always disqualifying, noting that Tobey Maguire played Spiderman in HS at 27.My response in a comment was also to point out that if you’re going for heightened reality it’s way easier to suspend that disbelief. A superhero movie or a Broadway musical clearly aid that suspension more than a movie that is apparently attempting to ground itself in reality and say IMPORTANT THINGS about HS culture today. I said this then, too, but Tobey Maguire could play Peter Parker in the Raimi films, but he couldn’t have played the lead in Spiderman Homecoming.
the cast of the film “grease” all looked like they were the teachers & not the students.
But grease existed in a heightened reality with large amounts of sexuality that made adults acting as teens rather enjoyable. Plus it was the 70s, and they were playing characters set in the 50s, when 14 year olds were working in mines and already had cigar voices.
And they also looked like they were of similar age.This actor next to the others makes it look like we’re going to see him on Dateline.
I’ll also concede that I haven’t seen that much of Ben Platt’s work (haven’t had a reason to watch the “Pitch Perfect” movies) to have his looks be that jarring to me, personally. When I saw the trailer, my initial thought was that he didn’t look high school age, but no one else did, either (save for Zoe and the other nerdy friend). If I was more familiar with Platt as an actor maybe it would have scanned as worse, but since I’m not, I just saw it as, “not great, but I’ve seen worse” with the age thing.
In general I agree with you (though a quick look at the first trailer I found had no gym locker scene, but I’m not surprised if they all have six, or at least four packs). But I think Caroline and others ARE saying the ways they seem to have self consciously tried to dress Platt and his much more mannered acting style than what we saw on stage (when for film it usually should be the other way around with the stage version more mannered) are what really sink the role. Sure lots of the cast doesn’t really look their characters age, but in the trailer, no one seems so… stand out odd as Ben (and apparently directing this with a nearly entirely naturalistic approach makes that worse).
The cast of the new West Side Story is mostly too old too (and of course that was true of the original but that was very true of the time) — and Riff is played by Mike Faist, who was Connor in the original Broadway DEH and is two years older than Platt (and was a kinda wrinkly looking teen recently on Panic). But I think with something like WSS which, despite Spielberg and Kushner apparently wanting to make it grittier, the production is so stylized (I had a friend who didn’t even believe me that the characters were meant to be high school age till I showed him the script) that that’s not so important.
For WSS it works for the setting as it’s reminiscent of other 50’s- set works where all the teens are super old (like a 35 year old Henry Winkler as the Fonz, and Grease of course)
The problem is the fact that he doesn’t even look 27, he looks mid 30’s, if they hadn’t try toyoungify him at all it would have been less distracting.
Person who’s watched the movie and was paid to write an opinion about it: Platt looks old. It’s distracting.Person in the comments: Yeah, but I’ve seen the TRAILER …
The show (and I assume the movie) is very reliant on the character’s age to justify his behavior.Now, the Broadway show didn’t even succeed at keeping me in Evan’s corner, and that was without Platt’s age being an issue. I can certainly see how watching someone who unambiguously looks like a grown man doing those same things, no matter how many times the movie says he’s 17 (or whatever), makes it even worse.
That said, I don’t believe this movie gets made without Ben Platt attached. Someone had to choose between making a movie and not making a movie, and that person chose the option anyone would choose.
I thought the exact same thing. A huge amount of text is dedicated to this point. Very few points are actually made. Its just single points that focus on verbiage.
I thought the exact same thing. A huge amount of text is dedicated to this point. Very few points are actually made. Its just single points that focus on verbiage.
I thought the exact same thing. A huge amount of text is dedicated to this point. Very few points are actually made. Its just single points that focus on verbiage.
I don’t have a problem with Ben Platt’s age, but I DO have a problem with that thing on top of his head. Dear GOD almighty, kill it with fire!!!!
Bad news: it’s made of asbestos, and therefore fireproof.
It could’ve been worse, like casting Oliver Platt to play a teenager.
I would have much preferred that. I hate Ben Platt’s face more than ive ever hated anyone else’s face, ever (aside from Trump).
<- Hell, Daniel Kaluuya, age 32, just won an Oscar for playing Fred Hampton, who died at 21. There is no universe where Kaluuya looks like he could pass for 21, but no one cared, and his performance was fucking brilliant. ->Quite a few cared, though, mostly as the ‘informant’ was 17 and casting him and Fred Hampton young would’ve highlighted the wrongness even more. Getting an Oscar does not mean there wasn’t talk
Maybe don’t comment on articles if all you bother to read is the headline?
If they had cast Tom Holland it would have been no problem, because aside from needing a shave, the dude looks 16.In this case, they threw everything and the kitchen sink at Platt to make him look the part (makeup, weight loss, CGI smoothing) and it seemingly fails on every level.
It’s common practice to cast adults to play teenagers, mostly due to child labor laws during filming.Yeah, but… there’s gotta be hundreds, if not thousands of people younger than 27 but old enough that child labor laws don’t apply.Even his exact age isn’t as important as the fact that he looks his age. It’s comical.
Of course there are, but how many of those younger people’s father would’ve funded the movie?
Casting a teen to play a teen isn’t always necessary. But it’s all about context. If Platt is a 27 year old that looks believably 34, opposite a 24 year old that looks believably 17? You’re off to a bad start getting me to buy into the premise.
It gets worse if the story then hinges on him making a huge mistake and then letting that mistake spiral out of his control. Because that sort of gut-wrenching, “I didn’t know what else to do, so I kept making the lie bigger” behavior is only forgivable, or even understandable, in a very young person.
So if the story relies on me believing that he’s a kid in over his head, for God’s sake, he better look like a kid who’s in over his head. Because that additional layer of artifice by the filmmaker starts to feel like an additional layer of artifice by the character. It adds a layer of insincerity to someone who I know is already lying. And then if part of the reason he’s doing all this is because the adult-looking man wants to make out with the teenage-looking lady? Add yet another level of extremely valid discomfort!
It read to me less like “He’s an adult playing a teen!” than “He’s the wrong adult to play this teen at this time!”It’s kind of like my wondering WTF Anthony Rapp, who was in his mid-Thirties when Rent was made into a movie, acted like he was entitled to squat in that crappy apartment building in the East Village. That’s less of an issue if he’s ten years younger, because when you’re first out of the house you don’t always connect having a roof over your head with paying for it (at one point I was living in the back of an Off-Off-Broadway theater for about two years rent-free, and then I spent several months on a slab of foam rubber in an acquaintance’s East Village living room!). As great as his performance was, it…doesn’t quite work with an older actor who looks and acts like he’s not a kid any longer….
32 -> 21 is almost certainly going to work better than 27 -> 17.
Do you watch college football? There are plenty of 20 year-olds who look like they’re 30. But I digress – Platt is straight-up distracting in the trailer.
I thought he was a middle-aged woman playing a teen boy, like that other show.
Orphan (2009)
I don’t know, Guy. The dude looks so fucking ridiculous in that still above, with Julianne Moore, that I’m certain I don’t need to see one, single second of this movie to know that I will be distracted by the fact that he’s supposed to be 17.
he looks 30 for fucks sake. its not hard to get young looking legal people. ask the porn industry.
also agree that I don’t think it’s that weird about Platt, I wouldn’t even know the difference if he wasn’t famous.Aside from that though, this story is fucking creepy.
I cant decide if you have god-awful reading comprehension, or are just being willfully oblivious. Yes, the performance not being good enough to justify the age difference is what they are saying. Try to keep up. They also explicitly state, in the very article youre commenting upon, that it also depends on the type and tone of the story, and that “one place where age-appropriate casting is kind of necessary is in an intimate teen drama that hinges entirely on the raw-nerve energy of its youthful lead to sell his character’s manipulative, cruel, selfish behavior as sympathetic rather than horrifying.”They literally explain their reasoning multiple times in this very article where youre asking them what their reasoning is, genius.
The issue isn’t solely that he’s 27, that happens a lot. It’s that the combination of that hair and dress make him look like Kyle Mooney playing a cartoonish teen on SNL, rather than someone presented slightly younger.
Dude looks like Teller.
Maybe this movie is a secret origin story as to why Teller never talks. I can see it now. He’s so ashamed of manipulating a grieving family for viral likes that Penn just bitchslaps him into silence. I’d pay $15 to see that.
I think the issue is notsomuch his age but that whatever they did to his face to try to make him look younger instead makes him look like a wax figure uncanny valley version of himself. If it were just Ben Platt looking like Ben Platt, I’d think “eh, weird, but whatever.” The attempts to make him look like a teenager actively distract and detract from everything happening because my primary thought is “what did they do to his face?” I don’t even think he looks older- he looks like a silicone muppet or someone wearing a human face mask over their own face.
That makes sense, and maybe that’s why it doesn’t bother me quite as much, as I’m not as familiar with Platt’s work, so my frame of reference is minimal.Oddly enough, this thread has made me wonder more about whether or not Hollywood should just pump the brakes on musical adaptations on the whole, unless they’re absolutely certain they’ve got a realistic looking cast. Between this, “Cats,” “Grease,” “West Side Story,” the completely ill-advised “West Side Story” remake, “Rent,” there are a LOT of musicals where apparently a lot of the magic is lost based on the age of the cast and the respective makeup jobs.Maybe that’s the real solution. Unless you’ve got such a solid cast of young, adult, and elderly like “In the Heights” where you’re sure you can make everyone believable, stick to original musicals only, where the creators can set the appearance standards themselves. Hell, Sparks made a fucking puppet believable with “Annette.” It can be done.
I mean, I agree with you because even “In The Heights” drew heat for not having enough Black Latin representation in the cast. Adapting musicals into movies is very hard and I think the only recent adaptation I can remember being universally lauded was “Chicago.” (Or maybe “Dreamgirls?”?) Because a musical is absurd on some level already, all it takes is one misstep to ruin the illusion all together and it’s really easy to piss off the musical fandom because, well… fandom.
I mean, I agree with you because even “In The Heights” drew heat for not having enough Black Latin representation in the cast. If you make a movie set in Washington Heights that has little to no Afro-Latinos in it, you deserve the heat.
The heat was entirely deserved
While you are stating obvious things about age and casting that is pretty much common knowledge and in no way you dropping the wisdom bombs you think you are – thanks for the condescension, by the way! – what none of that has anything to do with is that, just because it is common (and again, extremely well known and accepted, which you needlessly pointed out as if you were some sort of sage) doesn’t mean it works in every instance.
Your comment is responding to something not being said here in any way – that the concept of casting this way is what’s wrong. No one here is saying that. They’re saying it doesn’t work here.
You don’t have to agree with that, but don’t be so insulting and condescending as to assume (from your own misreading, apparently, based on the thing you were addressing that wasn’t said) that because this specific performance in this specific film isn’t liked, that it is a judgement on all this type of casting.
People just think it didn’t work here because it was too distracting and caused things benign from a teenager to seem manipulative from someone who can’t not look nor act like an adult.
Again, in no place was it stated that any issue was with this type of casting in general as if it was anyone’s first time encountering something like this. So your little lesson wasn’t really one at all, since not only was it providing any new information, but it wasn’t in response to anything actually said.
It’s not so much his age – though he does look far older. It’s the jarring choices to HIDE the age that are the most problematic.
See Michael Cera in Scott Pilgrim. He was WAY too old for that part, on the flip side Judd Nelson, Ally Sheedy, and Emilio Estevez were all in their 20’s when they made The Breakfast Club, yet their ages were not a hindrance in accepting them as teens.
I kind of assumed Scott was just a POS hitting on younger girls, so it worked for me.
It’s common practice to cast adults to play teenagers, mostly due to child labor laws during filming.I hate when this argument is applied to a situation where the character is supposed to be 17/18 (as opposed to a younger teen where it makes more sense). They could have cast an 18-21 year old, who is an adult and would not run afoul of child labor laws, instead of a 27-year-old who honestly looks like he’s in his 30s.Hell, Daniel Kaluuya, age 32, just won an Oscar for playing Fred Hampton, who died at 21. There is no universe where Kaluuya looks like he could pass for 21, but no one cared, and his performance was fucking brilliant.
I would argue that eras make a big difference here too. It’s easier to cast an older actor to play a character who was younger, but lived in an earlier era, than it is to cast an older actor to play a present-day younger character. (Also, the older the ages the less it matters. 32 vs 21 is not as big a deal as 27 vs 17).
Nothing about the setting or plot of Judas and the Black Messiah continually reminds you that the main character is and must be in his early 20s. Also, black don’t crack.
I just struggle to understand the why behind this movie, other than it was a hit on Broadway. DEH’s staging was fairly utilitarian and there aren’t really any big show-stopping numbers that would lend themselves to a glitzy Hollywood production or gigantic sets. If the impetus was to preserve Ben Platt’s performance, they should’ve gone the Hamilton route and filmed the actual show.Theatre allow for surrealism that can paper over DEH’s weird moral politics whereas transplanting it to film places it firmly in the real world where you can’t really wave away its problems.
Agreed. It’s a barely-coherent tightrope act of a plot that works on stage, but falls completely apart when translated to film
I didn’t think the staging was at all “utilitarian”–but rather quite stylized (and successful for me). But I agree with everything else. Certainly, while this would be hard to pull off on film in general, adapting it as a naturalistic work seems a big mistake.
It’s been done before successfully. The Hairspray musical had pretty mundane sets for the most part, and it made $203 million against its $75 million budget. Mind you, I agree that it might not translate well from stage to film.
Hairspray lends itself to some pretty extreme style though. So there’s appeal in a literal movie because you’ve got this gaudy retro flair to it.
It’s not too late to add an ADR line from someone with their back turned to the camera explaining that he has a rare medical condition that makes teenagers look ten years older.
Ah shit, so you’re telling me this movie isn’t already about a teen with progeria?
To be fair, don’t we all know remember that freshman in college that wore a baseball cap everywhere and then you saw them one time without the hat and they were balding and looked 35?
We had one guy in our freshman class who looked like he was 40. If you didn’t know any better, you’d think he was a professor. Now he looks the same and, of course, we all look like him.
YOU PEAKED IN HIGH SCHOOL
Widow’s peaked in High School…
Me. You’re talking about me.
I need the narrative around Platt’s casting to shift from “Is 27 too old to play a teenager?” to “You can’t play a teenager when you look like what would happen if Albert Brooks fucked one of Phil Spector’s wigs.”And pro-tip to most folks who want to appear younger for a role: losing weight will have the opposite effect. Don’t believe me? Ask this gaunt Art Garfunkle impersonator they’ve got warbling maudlin songs about suicide.
I’d feel more bad about dunking on someone this caustically if he didn’t get this role through pure nepotism in the first place.
And his egotistical insistence that the movie wouldn’t even exist without him.
His dad didn’t produce the musical, just the movie (only because Ben Platt was already attached). I agree that it was a terrible decision to cast him in the movie, and of course he got into acting through nepotism, but I don’t think that’s the specific reason why they cast him in the movie in this case
You…you dont think his dad being the producer is the reason he got the part? Smart as a whip, this one…
Ben Platt is an insufferable dipshit with zero self-awareness.
100% agree. It’s not a blanket age, it’s the individual. Ben Platt looks like a 37 year old youth group pastor who plays acoustic songs about how alcoholism destroys family life.
Jesus (not in a church youth group way) that is so perfectly descriptive. He looks like the harmless guy you are happy is running sunday evening youth activities for your kids but otherwise have little interest in talking to.
100% agree. It’s not a blanket age, it’s the individual. Ben Platt looks like a 37 year old youth group pastor who plays acoustic songs about how alcoholism destroys family life.You can’t see it but I’m tears laughing at such a perfect description!
He looks like Dennis Reynolds on the prowl at a high school
If the plot were “A Dennis Reynolds-type takes advantage of a family after their son dies” I’d be all for it.
I generally don’t like so much criticism to focus on appearance (Trump is the exception) but I laughed out loud at your Phil Spector’s wig line. I also saw this movie yesterday in the theater and his appearance is completely distracting. At no time was it believable for him to be 17/18 years old. The opening is a closeup on his face and it just looks…off. Maybe that was the CGI?
I don’t mind casting adults to play teenagers, necessarily, but this just looks off-putting.
More than anything, I just hate the fucking score, as well as the fact that this is what all Broadway shows sound like now. It’s like the cast of Glee fucked the house band of a megachurch.
It’s like the cast of Glee fucked the house band of a megachurch.
I’ve been searching for the words for years and here they are.
I actually like about a third of the score—I think some of the smaller songs, So Big/So Small, Sincerely Me, are pretty great actually. It’s when we get into all the big group power ballads (or even non group ones like Waving Through a Window) that Pasek and Paul get into their tendencies I hate the most. And thanks to this and Greatest Showman, probably the style they’ll use from now on (their earlier score for the Off-Broadway adaptation of Dogfight is great, I think, and showed a shitload of potential that they haven’t fulfilled.)
Dogfight was great, agreed.
The irony is Dogfight has come across some people who have called it problematic due to its storyline—when it opened in London pretty recently there were a ridiculous number of pieces that claimed it promoted misogyny and toxic masculinity, when it’s so clearly *not* promoting it—anything but. (I only bring this up because I think Dogfight deals with a potentially problematic storyline better than Dear Evan Hansen does. And, again, has a far better score…)
yeah I mean Dogfight pretty explicitly condemns the behavior of the men at “the dogfight” and has its male lead regret his participation and apologize for it… You can think that Rose is too forgiving, but she’s given plenty of agency by the writers to make that decision for herself—she doesn’t exist solely to absolve Birdlace of his sins.
Yeah, the discussion (and some outrage) that came out was basically, I think, a knee jerk reaction in our current atmosphere to people who don’t realize you can show problematic material without endorsing it (back in the 90s when the Nancy Savoca film came out, I don’t think there was any such discussion–not that saying something is “from a different time” is always a defense, but…) Like you said, Rose has full agency (and I mean the whole war aspect–and one of its themes being that these dumb teenage boys are being shipped off to the horrors of war with false promises of being heroes who will be lionized for their role–does make some difference…)
No… no, they are all terrible and completely insufferable.
It has bled into Disney films too, it was my biggest qualm about ever watching Frozen. It otherwise was fine, the music just makes me angry.
I’d actually love to read up on this more if you have articles or something to cite, because as someone who’s only passingly interested in musicals (loved them as a kid though, thanks to my mom), a LOT of the new ones all feel very same-y to me.
As a big musical geek, I think it’s just kinda what happens. When Rodgers and Hammerstein became huge, a large chunk of musicals (though by no means all) tried for a similar sound. I don’t even think that many musicals do have a similar sound right now, but I guess the ones aiming at a younger mainstream audience might? Stuff like Mean Girls isn’t really all that different style a score than the one for Beetlejuice (just picking two random shows, that I admit I don’t know well and don’t care to, but where the overall sorta “modern pop-Broadway” sound prevails)—or The Prom for that matter. It’s not my thing (I think, honestly, Pasek and Paul at least are capable of writing better stuff than the various songwriters for those shows) but… But, I mean, that’s not a similar sound to a show like Hadestown, or The Band’s Visit to pick two recent hits.
it all started with that fucking Wicked, didn’t it?
Fuck you, I just snarfed the one beer I was going to drink this evening and you ruined it.
What sucks about the movie is that it took out most of the songs that don’t sound like that, so the movie’s soundtrack will sound EXCLUSIVELY like that. Does Anybody have a map? and Good for you are both great songs that add much-needed variety to the soundtrack!
Right–even the baseball glove song.
The issue is WAY beyond just the score… The story is horrific. It’s all about us sympathizing with a Cis white Heterosexual Male that defrauds a town after he pulls attention from a suicide towards him, THEN he sexually assaults (again through fraud) the deceased boy’s SISTER. He then destroys the deceased boy’s parent’s lives.AND THEN EVERYONE COVERS FOR HIS ASS.It’s the height of white male victimhood coupled with white male privilege. It’s a fucking terrible story.
So this is what happens when Broadway’s gay:Jew ration gets too high?
Oh my god, that’s perfection. That’s EXACTLY what it is. 😂 (Also, might I direct you to Dave Malloy? Because he is not that. And we all know that Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812 was the ACTUAL Best Musical of 2017.)
All this talk about Platt being too old, and everyone’s just skimming past Kaitlyn Dever as a teenager in 2021? She’s been doing her wise-beyond-her-years-tween thing since approximately 1972.(Wow – apparently she’s only 24. When was “Justified”?)
She was just barely a teen when she started on Justified, and it’s still one of my favorite younger actor performances of all time.
Oh, yeah. She was great in Justified (which, seriously, I caught up with that via binge last year, and I had thought it was from maybe 2002). Great in Unbelievable. The best part of Last Man Standing, which…faint praise, much? I love her. It’s just that she specializes in these very old-for-their-ages characters.
24 isn’t that far from 27.
Back in 1957 she was the star of Leave it to Dever!
I don’t really care if older actors play teens, but I still can’t get past the fact that he played a college student nearly 10 years ago and now he’s back to playing a HS student.
How did Pitch Perfect come out almost 10 years ago!
Seriously, it’s making me feel so old. Why does it feel like my life has changed so much since then, despite also feeling the same?
“In giving Dear Evan Hansen the tone of a grounded indie drama, director Stephen Chbosky (The Perks Of Being A Wallflower) has lost the hook of seeing everyday suburban problems heightened to operatic musical theater proportions.”
This seems the biggest mistake with the concept of the film (and is probably connected to how Platt plays the role) and I gotta wonder what they were thinking. On stage it’s a stylized piece. And its main audience would happily, I think, accept a heavily stylized film…
yeah, Chbosky was a really bad pick for this one
Ben Platt all like
This took FAR too many “Load more comments” clicks.
This has become it’s own thing over the years that I’ve forgotten if it was from Scary Movie or if it was in Not Another Teen Movie alongside the grandma from Wedding Singer playing a rif on “Never Been Kissed.”
Forget the adult teenager. That plot is fucking ridiculous.
…an intimate teen drama that hinges entirely on the raw-nerve energy of its youthful lead to sell his character’s manipulative, cruel, selfish behavior as sympathetic rather than horrifying. … To be fair, Dear Evan Hansen knows that Evan is in the wrong—and so does Evan himself, who’s racked with guilt for most of the interminable 137-minute runtime. The problem is that the film doesn’t understand just how much he’s in the wrong, as it takes an uncomfortable “have it both ways” stance.
I felt this way about the Broadway show, too. This is a problem with the story itself. It throws all kinds of excuses at you to try and justify Evan’s behavior, but ultimately what Evan is doing never stops being wrong and isn’t really justifiable outside of that first meeting where he’s caught off-guard by the parents.
Fucked-up kid does fucked-up kid things. Everyone on the internet “HE IS NOT A GOOD PERSON!”…yeah, bro, that’s kinda the point
The show clearly knows he did something fucked up, it just wildly misjudges how fucked up it was.
I’m glad the sister doesn’t seem to end up dating him in the end, but she still shouldn’t exactly forgive him.
Not my point but I see how you got there. A play about a fucked up kid doing fucked up things is fine. It’s a common story. I take issue with the way the musical goes beyond forgiveness and redemption and totally excuses his actions by having someone I would call his victim come back at the end and actually tell him that her and some of his other victims “needed” what he did. That’s where, to me, it went from something I just wasn’t that into to something I thought was pretty gross.
Exactly this.“The thing you did was bad!… but the bad thing was actually good” reads like the show wanted to have its cake and eat it too when it came to condemning what Evan did without alienating everyone in the audience who might have identified with him over the course of the show. I fully understand being sympathetic with the sad boy, but there’s having sympathy for someone and then there’s excusing what they’ve done, and the show tips right over that line.
I think people often overlook the morality of Evan’s actions because So Big/So Small is such a compelling moment. It lets the audience feel like Evan has found the support he needs (ironically, where it always was) and shifts the focus from the harm he did to the Murphys.
When I saw the show on tour, one of my initial thoughts was that it would have been a disaster if the actor playing Evan wasn’t someone you immediately found likable. There has to be something charming about him that made you see him as an otherwise decent kid who got in over his head by trying to assuage the Murphys’ grief, and then got carried away by the prospect of finding a family and popularity. If he seemed calculating or too self-aware, he would come across as monstrous.
It sounds like Platt’s performance on film lost the charm he had on stage. Whether that is due to his seeming too old, the makeup, or the mannerisms he adopted for the film, I can’t tell. But if the audience doesn’t like Evan enough to forgive his actions, the entire work falls apart.
Did he have to have Rand Paul growing on his head?! It’s the fucking wig!
They should have got Martin Short to play him. With his Clifford outfit.
I’m convinced this movie is a Kyle Mooney prank.
I feel bad for Ben Platt. He’s probably a nice guy and I don’t wanna bully him for his looks. But I’d be mad at the movie. They made him look like frigging Todd from Community! He’s so glaringly out of place. I think they should’ve had him a sort of narrator role while someone younger played Ben Platt’s character.
Aha! He totally looks like Todd from Community.
nah, someone pointed out that he’s been really shite about it, defending himself by saying nobody else could have made the movie despite the half-dozen others who have played the role on and off broadway, including his current boyfriend (!!!!) who had the role. also his father is a producer on the movie. hence why he got the role. so nah. don’t care about the feelings of rich actors and their massive egos who are willing to throw others, even those close to them, under the bus.
The ads and the way he looks in the film DO make me want to bully him. And I was a pudgy band geek who gets nervous when someone texts me “we need to talk”
The misunderstanding hinges on a contrived device: a letter that Evan writes himself as a therapy exercise, which falls into Connor’s hands and is subsequently mistaken for a suicide note.Meh. I’ll allow it.
“So you don’t go to school?”
“Heck no, I’m thirty years old!”
Who the fuck is Evan Hansen? I’ve never heard of this shit before
He’s the 4th Hanson brother, but was banished and had to legally change the spelling of his last name.
Do we know for sure that the show/movie knows that Evan is in the wrong? I read the plot summary for the Musical and he gets off way, WAY too easy. It’s a horrid tale about a monstrous, shallow weirdo, and the ending basically said the psychopathic acts he did was for the best and it made his community better??? WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS SHIT AND HOW DID IT BECAME SO ACCLAIMED? It’s the songs, isn’t it?
Yes, the show knows he’s in the wrong. Yes, it’s only popular because of the songs. Pasek and Paul had their finger on the pulse of what mass audiences in 2016/2017 wanted between this, La La Land, and the Greatest Showman! Interested to see if they ever make another hit since the tide seems to have turned against them in recent years
As it should! I’m not a big fan of the Lopez’s songwriting (I credit most of Book of Mormon to Trey Parker who really knows how to write great tunes), but P&P make them look like Rodgers and Hammerstein. I’m still shocked people like their songs so much.
It doesn’t seem like the show knows, though, because they’re telling us Evan’s actions are ultimately for the better for the people around him. Which is gross as fuck.Fair on the songs. I think the duo’s music are better for larger-than-life spectacles like the Greatest Showman vs the indie vibes of Dear Chris Hansen though.
I ask these questions as someone totally disconnected from the Broadway world: Would fans of DEH be upset if they had cast someone else in the Ben Platt role, whether or not it was one of the other actors who played that role on stage? Is the role tied that closely to his performance, in the fans’ minds? If the idea here was to please fans of the show, it seems like they alienated a lot more people in doing so, judging from the internet buzz about the casting.
I don’t think there would have been much upset if he wasn’t cast. The show played to similar audiences after he was replaced and on tour, though it kinda flopped in London but shows playing in London and not Broadway and vice versa happens actually fairly regularly (even if he Platt, sure, get a ton of praise for the role)
And Platt isn’t such a huge star that his casting would have been an attraction to people who don’t follow Broadway.If they had cast someone who could pass for a teenager on-screen, the film probably would have still been panned and sunk quietly without a trace, but it wouldn’t have become an object of ridicule.
I think fans would have been fine with someone else as the lead as long as Platt was in the movie in some other part and/or genuinely seemed to endorse the film version. I think most of the fans knew that Platt had started to age out of the role if it was getting some kind of film/tv adaptation.
The fans, as much as they can be trusted to act in lockstep, would have been fine. Andrew Barth Feldman is (still) an actual teenager with a fan base who played the role on Broadway to much acclaim. Further, the fandom found much to enjoy in watching him mature vocally into the role — he started his run singing some of his songs a bit lower than Platt and wound up moving to the original key. If the producers of this movie had given them someone new to love, the fans would have adapted.
Would fans of DEH be upset if they had cast someone else in the Ben Platt roleI think Platt’s dad would be upset. And since he’s the producer of the movie he probably has a pretty large say about who plays the main role
How the producers cast this film
It’s not his age. 27 isn’t even that old for actors playing teenagers. IT’S THAT HE LOOKS ABOUT 40.
I know nothing about this film, but the review makes it sound like they just rewrote the roles from the Robin Williams/Bobcat Goldwaithe film “World’s Greatest Dad” and threw in some showtunes.
How dare you rope Julianne Moore into this, you monsters!
Did anyone watch Run This Town? That shitty film about Rob Ford? If that performance from Platt isn’t reason enough to never hire him….
He was in a movie about that piece of shit Rob Ford? When was this?
Is he Rob Ford in a fatsuit? I might…be ok with this
Run This Town. I want to say three or four years ago now? It’s putrid. I don’t think it really made it over the border, but it played in Canada. It also features Damien Lewis in a fat suit as Ford, but he’s not in it nearly enough for it to be worth the runtime.
Holy shit that sounds like a horrible way to spend *checks notes* 2 PLUS HOURS?!
This is bad because we know the inner workings of how old the actor really is and how old the character is supposed to be.That’s ultimately the same argument people use when they same that Hamilton is stupid because all of the historical characters are supposed to be played by white people.
We know the inner workings of how old the actor is because he looks that old, and we know how old he’s supposed to be because he’s in high school. And as plenty of people have already pointed out, the reason it’s a problem rather than just a weird-but-ignorable-discrepancy is because the entire plot hinges on Evan Hansen exuding an aura of extreme childish naivety, and Ben Platt just doesn’t. Without that, the story goes from tragic to sinister, and there’s no recovery.It’s not just “he old; should be young.” There’s a reason this one’s getting shit when every other teenage-focused media filled with 20-somethings gets by unscathed.
I have no idea why this film was made, or who it was aimed for. The trailer is god awful and made me laugh out loud at the cringe. The majority of people involved in modern filmmaking need to find another career.
It’s like the playwriters/screenwriters saw Robin Williams in “World’s Greatest Dad” and “High School Musical” on the same day and thought that a mashup would be a good idea.
I wish I could say I was surprised by this review, but the more time that passes between the moment I saw Dear Evan Hansen on Broadway with the original cast and what has happened since, the more I can understand the backlash.In the moment, with the original cast on stage and experiencing the show in its intended setting, it was very easy to be swept away. Ben Platt’s stage presence as Evan was more than just compelling – it trapped you in Evan’s head with no chance of escaping. So the Pasek/Paul songs felt like a river that you fell into and no amount of swimming would get you to shore. You were carried along by each set piece, and when you got to the moment where Evan is getting ready to give his assembly speech and he drops his cue cards, and Ben Platt’s entire body radiated the terror and anguish in the moment, how could you not feel it yourself? But it was because you were there and it was visceral and magnetic and if you were in the first few rows you might actually get some of Ben’s tears on you.But if you take yourself out of that context, everything falls apart like a poorly-constructed house of cards. Pasek and Paul write stupendously earwormy hooks, but they’re like a giant container full of frosting with no cake. The nagging sense of that turns into a full-blown crisis when you move on to The Greatest Showman soundtrack, whose “Glee-fucks-megachurch-house-band” ethos (thank you, @Cosmia) is even more egregious. The DEH plot, taken out of the live performance, is clearly problematic in how it introduces weighty concepts and then skims across them like a mosquito on a lake. And Ben Platt’s dynamic presence is anchored irrevocably in the live performance – once it is removed from that comfortable context, it becomes washed out and transparent.Dear Evan Hansen would have benefited much more from going the Hamilton or Into the Woods route – releasing the original stage performance in theaters or on video. I know such a recording exists – from what I understand, every Broadway show gets the video treatment with the original cast, and it is then archived somewhere in New York. Maybe that would have worked to communicate what so many of the show’s fans loved about DEH during its original run. This movie, however, is incapable of that. It’s a poorly-done cosplay of the original and it doesn’t even require an aged Ben Platt in an ‘80s Eugene Levy perm to come to that conclusion.
It perhaps doesn’t help that Ben Platt, to be frank, has a kind of Art Garfunkel-esque middle-aged vibe to him. .
Wait, so the songs here are by The Greatest Showman people? I’m going to pass on this thing based on that information alone. “Broadway-by-way-of-Christian-rock” is a spot-on assessment of their work, and it’s horrifying.
Or is the film critiquing the way we all glom onto strangers’ tragedies in order to make ourselves feel like we’re part of something? Was… when was this line written? The review. Because currently, a young woman is murdered and the internet is currently trying to destroy any chance of her getting justice by making it about themselves.So, yeah, I’d say misunderstanding what’s going on and strangers weighing is perhaps something we should be looking at currently. Also, it’s a little shocking (not really) that a movie that was dunked on by critics during the first trailer isn’t getting a good reception.
there are times when casting a twentysomething as a teenager isn’t particularly distracting. The heightened worlds of darkly comedic satire and soapy high-school romance make it easy enough to roll with unrealistic casting choices—and that goes for stage musicals, too, where some level of artifice is built into the format. Yeah, the context of the performance makes a big difference, but also… he was more than two years younger when he filmed The Politician.
Okay. Because of Rocket League, I decided to watch his music video for Imagine (it’s one of the player anthems you can use, which I do).
The first half, I feel like he’s in love with his room. But at the end, it’s very clear that he really loves that jacket.
the more hype i see about this movie from the kids on twitter and tiktok, i find myself literally morphing into principal skinner saying “no, it is the children who are wrong”
The issue is WAY beyond just Ben Platt… The story is horrific. It’s all about us sympathizing with a Cis white Heterosexual Male that defrauds a town after he pulls attention from a suicide towards him, THEN he sexually assaults (again through fraud) the deceased boy’s SISTER. He then destroys the deceased boy’s parent’s lives.AND THEN EVERYONE COVERS FOR HIS ASS.It’s the height of white male victimhood coupled with white male privilege. It’s a fucking terrible story.
I look forward to The Flophouse, We Hate Movies, and all other bad movie podcasts to cover this in the coming months.
I wonder if it’ll make their worst of 2021 batch of episodes? I think Cruella might make it up there due to their comments on the 1990’s 101 Dalmatians remake (I enjoyed Cruella but I do look forward to their review of it).
This was my biggest problem with Call Me by Your Name, where you had Armie Hammer (then 29, looking 39, playing a 24-year-old) having a largely predatory relationship with Timothee Chalamet (then 20, looking 14, playing a 17-year-old) and then having to listen to Michael Stuhlbarg explain how lovely and nourishing it all was.
All I know is the trailer before Shang Chi had the entire theater groaning. It went on for like 5 minutes and told the entire, creepy story while trying to make it look like some kind of triumph.
Oh, he is 27, he looks 40. He was really awkward in Pitch Perfect. I wonder how he is getting big roles, lets google his family.“Platt was born in Los Angeles, the fourth of five children of Julie (née Beren) and Marc Platt. His father is a film, television, and theater producer whose credits include Legally Blonde, Into the Woods, La La Land, Mary Poppins Returns, and the musical Wicked.[7] “Well, that explains it.
We know Evan’s memorial speech is bogus, yet we’re still supposed to be swept up in his performance of “You Will Be Found,” a generically uplifting anthem about reaching out to others in times of need. I’m not sure we are – it’s just that the song kind of picked that up because people often enjoy the surface-level vibes of something like this while ignoring the deeper stuff on it. To me, the song is supposed to feel rather phony, both because of the context and because of the tone. It sounds like a religious revival song. What really bothers me from looking at the plot summary on Wikipedia is that it sounds like they tried to fix the ending in the wrong way, again (like with the novel). It’s always been thematically wrong to have him reconcile with Zoe in the orchard, especially since the Murphys are basically just something he has to give up in the 2nd Half as part of doing the right thing.
Go watch “Come from Away” on AppleTV instead. A great filmed performance of the Broadway play that I knew very little about until watching. A brisk hour and a half of extremely entertaining musical theatre.
Let’s make this clear…there’s nothing wrong with casting older people to play younger parts. Happens often, and it’s normally not an issue. The problem here is that is that they seem to have made so much of an effort to make him look younger, that it falls into self-parody.
So way back when….the hugely popular 90210 (a high school themed series and not a one time movie) featured the following…at the start of filming:From IMDBAt the start of filming, Shannen Doherty was 19, Jennie Garth was 18, Tori Spelling was 17, Jason Priestley was 20, Luke Perry was 23, Brian Austin Green was 17, Ian Ziering was 26, and Gabrielle Carteris was 29.
Now this show might predate many here….but it was a thing.
Once they cross a certain threshold, old people can’t tell young people apart; to them you all look alike, what with your non wrinkled faces, heads full of hair and your mouthfuls of teeth. Me? I’m in the space in between, where I can mentally understand the difference, but I’m starting not to notice anymore if I’m not looking for it. I’m not writing in all caps just yet, but I even use ellipsis, that sure sign of senescence…Now get out of my lawn!
What a shame. I really liked the original musical soundtrack and was looking forward to be able to see the musical.
I’m posting this here because Deadspin doesn’t allow comments. For some reason, they are “Sports News Without Fear, Favor or Compromise”, but they fear comments from actual readers. What gives?
(who are also responsible for the toe-tapping numbers from The Greatest Showman).
…okay but like didn’t that movie also really suck?
If the claim is they cast Platt to “preserve his performance…” let’s follow it up with this question: Why isn’t the rest of the cast of the movie the same as on Broadway?Surely his performance was a product of working with such a talented cast, no?
The only adult still suitable to play a teen is Michael Cera
So the main character isn’t autistic? Just from the commercials, I really thought that was the angle of this movie.
I could swear this already came out, but it was about gay high school kids.
“In giving Dear Evan Hansen the tone of a grounded indie drama, director Stephen Chbosky has lost the hook of seeing everyday suburban problems heightened to operatic musical theater proportions.”Man, this just nails the problem with modern musical adaptations. They’re not necessarily “grounded indie dramas” but directors keep trying to take the musical out of musicals. Oh, this isn’t a corny musical, this is grounded/gritty/realistic.Do characters randomly break into song? Then guess what, stop worrying about grounding it in reality and start worrying about how to make the best damn musical you can. At the very least I have confidence Spielberg will deliver an actual big screen musical rather than these adaptations that have one foot in and one foot out of the genre.
Having seen this, I didn’t find his age to be the problem. It was the efforts to MASK his age that were the most jarring. The haircut, the makeup, the weird CGI to smooth his face. He looks like a cartoon of Marcia Clark next to the rest of the cast.Before CATS, the movie version of MAME was largely considered to be the worst musical of all time. The studio felt Angela Lansbury wasn’t enough of a film star at the time, so they went with a rapidly aging Lucille Ball. While her smoker’s voice was an issue, one of the chief critical concerns of the era was that the director chose to shoot all of Lucille Ball’s closeups in a fuzzy out of focus light. People joked they’d rubbed vaseline or chicken fat on the lens. When juxtaposed with the in focus master shots or closeups of other actors, it was bizarre and distracting. Had they just embraced the fact she looked a bit older, it would have been far less problematic. Same seems to be the case here, as history repeated itself it would seem.
This reads like the review for a movie that should have received a “D” or lower. Crazy conspiracy theory of mine: No matter how terrible a major studio release is AV Club is not permitted to give it a score below a “C-” unless given permission from either G/O Media or the studio itself. So that means “F”s are only reserved for Dinesh D’Souza turds and other right wing independent films and that “C-” is the new “F” which means anything below a “B+” is shit.
Everytime I see anything promoting ‘Evan Hansen’ all I can think of is that it’s some kind prequel to ‘It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’ telling the story of how Dennis became a sociopath.
So they made the “How do you do fellow kids?” meme into a musical movie?
Honestly, I hadn’t previously been familiar with Dear Evan Hansen before it came out and didn’t know much before reading this article. However, I can definitely believe that Kaitlyn Dever’s “effortlessly naturistic” performance as a “grief-stricken teen” “almost” (?) made doing a gender-swapped version centered on her worth it. (And, yes, I imagine that, seeing her “on the street,” one would know that she’s in her 20s, she does come across believably as a teenager in movies.) Yep. She is a fucking brilliant actress in both dramatic and comedic roles. I might very well see this…interesting-sounding contraption just for her performance. And, of course, Amy Adams is consistently brilliant, too. I realize that other factors (direction, etc., the way writing is conveyed — I generally hate to blame screenwriters for a film’s failings unless they’re also the directors and/or producers since producers, directors, various executives, etc. have carte blanche to freely alter/mutilate writers’ work) can torpedo the efforts of even amazing actresses and actors, but I’m inclined to have a lot of faith in Ms. Dever’s and Ms. Adams’ abilities. Julianne Moore, of course, is also great, as the reviewer great, and I’ve found Danny Pino to be consistently solid in TV and film roles as well.