User:Drag0n/sandbox/Dear Evan Hansen

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"Cats is looking at this shit and laughing!"

- Schaffrillas Productions

Dear Evan Hansen is a 2021 American musical coming-of-age drama film directed by Stephen Chbosky from a screenplay by Steven Levenson. It is based on the 2015 stage musical of the same name by Levenson, Benj Pasek, and Justin Paul. Ben Platt plays the title role, reprising the performance that he originated on stage. The ensemble cast also includes Kaitlyn Dever, Amandla Stenberg, Nik Dodani, Colton Ryan, Danny Pino, Julianne Moore, and Amy Adams.

Plot
Evan Hansen is an anxious, isolated high-school student who's aching for understanding and belonging amid the chaos and cruelty of the social media age. He soon embarks on a journey of self-discovery when a letter he wrote for a writing exercise falls into the hands of a grieving couple whose son took his own life.

Bad Qualities

 * 1) The biggest problem the film goes through was that Ben Platt, a 27-year-old at the time, was cast as a 17-year-old Evan Hansen, and the makeup used to try to de-age him only made him look older. Ben Platt was too old to be playing a character a decade younger than him. Granted, he did play the character in the musical, but Ben was 21 at the time and more fit to play the role here.
 * 2) * It's been reported that Ben was cast due to nepotism, as his father Marc was a producer and ironically and somewhat hilariously came out on Ben Platt's birthday (September 24). Ben dismissed this as he pointed out how adult actors are selected to play as teens, as shown by the 1978 film Grease. While it is true that adult actors are selected as teens in Grease, they at least give very decent performances on how is it like to be teenagers at the time.
 * 3) * Not to mention, Ben's age really takes away from the believably of a teenager doing something as horrifying as gaslighting a teenager's suicide for personal gain and to be in a romantic relationship with that person's sister. In the stage musical, Evan's actions were still terrible, but due to his initial naivete and childishness, it could be a bit easier for the viewer to understand why Evan would do what he did since he's a kid and kids make poor choices. However, since Evan looks like an adult in this film, it's way harder to understand or sympathize with him since he looks like he should know that what he's doing is wrong, but he still does what he does.
 * 4) The film's depiction of mental illness is rather disgusting. While mental illness is pretty complex to be portrayed in the media, the film seems to promote it and make it sound like a good idea that can be considered if you're depressed so that other people can benefit from your death for their own selfish ends only to receive no comeuppance when they're actions are called out. It makes ending your life seem like quite a normal and even noble thing to do when that could not be further from the truth. As such, the film makes for an extremely toxic representation of mental illness and suicide similar to the way it was done in 13 Reasons Why.
 * 5) Putting aside the moral implications, the characters in this film either have significantly less of a purpose in the story such as Heidi or are downright reprehensible.
 * 6) *Evan is an obvious example of this, given how he emotionally manipulates a grieving family into believing that he was friends with their son who committed suicide so he could be admired by the masses and be in a relationship with the dead kid's sister. Not only does this add into the film's already problematic portrayal of depression, but with Ben Platt's awful performance and Evan facing no retribution for his actions aside from apologizing to the people he manipulated in a similar vein as Cosmodore or Logan Paul, Evan becomes an extremely unlikable and unsympathetic character whose actions are much harder to excuse than they were before.
 * 7) *Although we don't see too much of him before his death, Connor is only portrayed as a bully who throws tantrums, overreacts, and attacks people for hardly any reason whatsoever, making for a very surface-level portrayal of depression.
 * 8) *Alana, while not as horrible as Evan, posts what is believed to be Connor's suicide note on the internet despite Evan telling her not to and causing Connor's family to be cyberbullied as a result.
 * 9) The actors all give very weak performances.
 * 10) * Ben Platt's performance is especially bad, given how he constantly twitches, gaffes, and Naruto runs (Although the latter only happens in one scene) all in an attempt to mask his age, which also makes him seem more like a caricature of someone with anxiety than how it normally is for people suffering from the disorder in real life.
 * 11) The songs, despite having ok lyrics due to how it never changes, are very badly performed.
 * 12) *Considering how Evan is in all but one song, his singing has way too many voice cracks, whisper-singing, and instances of unnecessary opera-style vibrato, plus he constantly jitters and waves his arms around in a way that's supposed to show off his awkwardness but fails miserably.
 * 13) * The other cast members don't put in too much effort for their singing, especially Julianne Moore having some pretty noticeable autotune in her singing.
 * 14) There were changes to the source material that felt extremely pointless, like how Larry Murphy, who was Connor's father in the musical, was changed to Larry Mora, Connor's stepfather, and how songs such as Anybody Got a Map and Good For You were cut for seemingly no reason other than to maintain focus on Evan, which the director has admitted was intentional in the case of Anybody Got a Map's removal.
 * 15) Poor and lifeless direction by Stephen Chbosky.
 * 16) Bland cinematography.



Good Qualities

 * 1) Even if he seemed to get much lighter repercussions than he did in the stage musical, it is nice to know that Evan vowed not to make the same mistakes that got him in trouble, thus making the ending very decent.
 * 2) Evan and Zoe's relationship was handled slightly better than the way it was in the stage musical.
 * 3) Despite the terrible acting in this film, Amy Adams seemed to be trying with her performance.

Reception
On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, 29% of 272 critics have given the film a positive review with an average rating of 4.70/10. The critics consensus reads, "Dear Evan Hansen does a fair job of capturing the emotion of its source material, but it's undermined by questionable casting and a story that's hard to swallow." On Metacritic the film has a weighted average score of 39 out of 100 from 48 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews".

Trailers
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Reviews
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