A needlessly thorough roast of Dear Evan Hansen (2021)

so sometimes a bad movie comes along that is just so rare so precious it cannot pass unacknowledged i've honestly been toiling away at like a three hour video for months and was determined not to talk about anything else until i was done with that but this movie dragged me back i'm like the scientist in a disaster movie that comes out of retirement because the sun is about to smash into the air and dear evan hansen is too awkward too bizarre too misguided there's just so much to unpack so in memory of my viewing experience i have prepared this beautiful tribute and in order to help my tribute go viral i have organized my thoughts into a numbered list part one the story i need to give a preemptive content warning here at the beginning because a supporting character in this film takes his own life it happens like right at the beginning and is basically the catalyst for like the entire plot so i can't omit it from this video so if that's something that you don't want to engage with i think you just won't be able to watch this whole thing i'm sorry so we've just all agreed if you haven't left you're on board for that so let's go into it dear evan hansen is a high school boy with bad depression and anxiety he has no friends he can't even order postmates because he's deathly afraid of having to interact with the delivery guy at the beginning of our story he is returning back to school after summer break and he has a newly broken arm at school evan has a crush on a cool girl named zoe who plays the electric guitar in the school band didn't have those in my day but zoe has a brother named connor who is also an outcast and who is mean and sometimes bullies evan dear evan's therapist has asked him to write letters of affirmation to himself beginning with dear evan hansen his letters are very raw and vulnerable and for reasons unknown to me he types them at school surrounded by all of his peers where they could just walk by and look over his shoulder at any moment conor takes evan's most recent depressing letter right off the school printer and then takes his life after school making evan's letter to himself appear to be conor's suicide note since the note is addressed to evan connor's family assumes that evan must have been a dear friend and confidant so now they want to bond with evan in order to learn more about their troubled son and evan is drawn in by the affection of this rich family and their hot daughter that he has a crush on and that's the story of the musical his lie just kind of grows from there and then miscellaneous things happen to be honest i already had no great love for the stage musical i found its messaging pretty hollow and then it's story and music not really compelling enough to be worth a watch unless maybe the seats were like discounted and every other broadway show was cancelled for the night however the play story is at least more competent and complete than the abridged version that we get in this movie their choices of what to cut what to change and what to add are confusing at best and disastrous at worst part two ben platt wants an oscar but he is 45 years old okay ben platt is only 28 but you would not know it watching this movie he originated this role on stage in 2015 all through the workshops and straight up to its broadway run he was only 22 at that time so already older than the 17 year old character of evan in my opinion ben never looked convincingly like a teenager in any of the time he played evan some people look like teenagers into their 20s and others don't that's not a good thing that's not a bad thing it's just a fact but it also doesn't really matter as much on broadway firstly because there's a higher suspension of disbelief in the medium as a whole but secondly because the audience is physically much farther away from your face casting wildly out of age range is like pretty common for plays i mean you see tons of plays specifically written where the character goes from their teenage years to like their 50s or 60s and the part is written for one person to play it the whole time but this is a film and evan hansen is only supposed to be a teenager and we're looking at ben platt's comically adult looking face up close and in 4k for the bulk of the run time they've done all these things to him which i think are supposed to make him look younger but just make him look worse and older they've got him in this weird mullet s hairstyle i assume this would be natural curls but they're styled in such a clumpy way they look like a wig i can only guess the objective of this hairstyle was to disguise either a receding hairline or forehead creases i don't know enough about ben platt's face to know if either of these are an issue for him but i also can't imagine any other thing on this earth that would make a studio approve this look he's also aged by the heavy foundation they've put on him again probably thinking it'll make him look younger but it just weighs down his whole face and makes him look crazy he hunches his shoulders and slinks around probably to try to make himself look physically smaller but it lends a menacing quality to his movement as he skulks around these halls full of actual children like if you see him in all the talk show interviews and performances to promote this movie he looks like a normal guy in his late 20s a normal good-looking guy kind of giving me josh groban energy actually and then you see him in the film inexplicably looking like some kind of sweaty 90s sitcom dad made of melting wax his styling in the film carries him straight into the uncanny valley intellectually you know what ben platt looks like and that he is a normal looking man but in this film there is something twisted and unnatural about him like you're looking at a mission-impossible style mask of his face and then they drop him into scenes next to all these normal looking people older actors who are playing their actual ages and look natural actors who are 22 23 wearing minimal makeup and look convincingly enough like students if you held up this image for me and asked me to typecast this man i would probably say i don't know dave the father of alvin and the chipmunks in the live-action film this is probably a controversial take but in my opinion even his singing style serves to age him ben platt favors a lot of vibrato and this part calls for a lot of falsetto often at the same time it's all very calm wilkinson and when people say something is very calm wilkinson they're probably not saying it's like a youthful and vibrant teenager [Music] so you've got a scene of a bunch of normal looking characters and in shambles this big hunching mop-headed man eyes sunken into his artificially puffy face warbling out high notes like an anxious jiminy cricket so how did this casting choice come about i'm sure we're all wondering well for people not aware of this important context this film was produced by ben platt's dad so yeah that's when people were upset about ben platt's casting online he took to his instagram and said were i not to do the movie it probably wouldn't get made and he's probably right his dad probably wouldn't have wanted to pay for this movie if it wasn't his own little boy in the starring role and we can't know for certain whether it would have been funded or not were it not for mark platt's involvement but honestly what kind of comeback even is that you literally just told us it's a vanity project funded by your daddy i don't think that's going to help anyone's outlook on the blatant miscasting of the lead role a character who's on screen nearly all of the time and the thing is ben platt is an extremely talented performer i believe he probably could have had a career singing even without nepotism which is high praise but i don't believe he would have been cast in this role in this film if the casting was up to anyone but his own father to make matters worse he delivers what i believe is the weakest performance in the entire movie or weak is probably the wrong word because he's definitely giving it all he's got but it's a performance that clashes with everybody else on screen there's a lack of subtlety to all of his choices that feels very misguided i know ben's done film acting before and to my knowledge he didn't do a bad job at it so all i can guess is that he performed this role for the stage for so long that he kind of lost sight of how to modify his existing performance for the film and it reads as very strange on film that whenever he's conveying emotions he wildly bugs out his eyes he thrusts out his chin he flails his arms around the gestures really got me at first i gave him the benefit of the doubt i thought maybe this physicality is a choice because evan's got social anxiety socially awkward people will often make jerky or unnatural gestures because they're nervous and they don't know what to do with their hands i mean why do you think i go like this while i'm talking the whole time i'm doing a video it helps me remember and also i don't know what to do with my hands but over the course of many of these songs evan's social anxiety melts away at many points he becomes confident or contemplative lost in a daydream and the performance never changes he's always in full flail mode and it's not just the flailing it's the fact that ben platt insists on doing these horrifically literal hand gestures to go along with every word that he sings i've compiled some of my favorites all from a single song we pick a spot and shift the breeze pick a spot and shoot the breeze telling jokes no one understands telling jokes no one understands let the world pass by let the world pass by cause the sun shines bright because the sun shines bright and my personal favorite how the world might look from up so high he acted every word of that one how will they know what i mean by up high if i don't show them and nobody else in the movie is doing this so you've got his uncanny larger-than-life styling and his flailing exaggerated acting and he's acting off of understated and grounded performances like all of the characters around him are experiencing emotions just as extreme as evans but they're performing them like real people let's look at the others and i've deliberately sought out the most intense facial expressions i can find from these guys in the sake of fairness here is zoe singing passionately she's crying and screaming and everything here is alana singing passionately here is evan's mom singing passionately and here is evan singing passionately i mean there's emotion and then there's this it looks like his face is trying to escape his head it kills me because i imagine that this exact performance a hundred feet away on a stage would be incredible you can act this big on stage and you kind of have to because people are far away and they can't see the tiny nuances of your face but for film this is way too much eye bugging too much head shaking too much arm waving and the fact that it's an adult man wearing oversized polo shirts trying to cosplay as a little kid makes the performance even more surreal and in case you didn't realize this is a significant problem because evan is meant to carry this movie the evan performance is the show that's why it's theoretically a good vanity project to buy for your little boy because if he does a good job he could get an oscar and the thing is ben platt didn't have to star in it he could have just borrowed his dad's money and gotten a producer credit on it then he'd still be involved or he could have directed it or at least co-directed it to still have a hand in the project and still get an award if the movie won awards he could have used the opportunity to step into a cameo or supporting role and then elevated a younger or less known actor to the role of evan but it seems he just couldn't stand the idea of someone else potentially getting an oscar for this role which he must believe he owns sometimes you can't have it all ben platt and this thing we've got here certainly isn't going to help your career and that's not to mention the damage it does to the film evan's actions throughout are pretty morally questionable an element i will unpack later so it's crucial that evan look young and vulnerable because then even when it seems like he's being selfish or he takes it way too far you're like well he's a mentally ill child but instead you're watching this film and you're like that man is old enough to run for president part three mommy why is the scary man singing the way this movie handles its songs is so funny in a well-balanced musical you'll usually have a handful of solo songs and then just as many ensemble numbers most often a solo song will tell you about what a character is feeling their goals fears reflections on what's going on at this moment meanwhile the ensemble numbers are more likely to directly further the plot characters can interact with each other they can react to things they can serve as a sort of montage sequence that's why you want a good balance of both you want to have those numbers to check in with your major characters so you can feel connected to them but you also need those songs that are going to keep it rolling if you watch a movie with too many ensemble numbers it might start to feel like a cabaret like you're watching all these characters come in and sing but you're not really learning anything about the depth of them but that's a pretty uncommon problem to be honest the much more rookie mistake is a musical with too many solos because a lot of people if they haven't written a musical before they just think of all the characters in their show and think of a song that each of those characters could sing and then you know if they're like an amateur they don't go back and revise that they're just like that's my track list so then if you watch a musical with too many solos you will really feel that as an audience member because you'll start to feel that whenever a song kicks in the story grinds to a halt in better musicals solo songs can at least be an emotional turning point for a character where they decide on some important action through monologue here are some examples from famous musicals hurricane in hamilton hamilton's enemies have backed him into a corner he frets about that he gives us anecdotes we don't know from throughout his life then those anecdotes inform his questionable decision to publish his letters we understand him better but also the plot is moved forward directly by the song or we have javier's suicide in les mis javert has been granted mercy by his enemy he sings about the principles by which he's lived his life and how they have been shaken and then he decides he can't live with the guilt and conflict and jumps off the bridge [Music] pretty major story beat and it's happening in the song the character is monologuing but we're also moving things along most of the songs in dear evan hansen feel like pop songs because they are a single character feeling a single emotion and usually an emotion we didn't need a pop song to spell out for us evan sings a song about how he has anxiety and that is the whole content of the song he starts the song with anxiety just kind of tells us that one concept the whole time and then at the end of the song he hasn't made any significant decision it's just he has anxiety to make matters worse a lot of these songs are staged in the boringest way possible there's exactly one fun musical number called sincerely me i'm gonna get more into this number later but it's bouncy the performers are having fun with it there's dancing the editing is on point and that's the only song like that in the whole show for the majority of the songs the characters aren't even standing up they're just sitting somewhere and we're staring at their face as it sings at us sitting on a bed sitting at a table sitting on a bean bag sitting on a bed sitting at a desk sitting on a bed sitting on a couch the most ridiculous staging to me is the alana song she and evan are already walking down a street they're already moving then it cuts to them in a park sitting on a swing set and then she starts singing like they really went out of their way to have her sit down before the song began god forbid we get a more dynamic setup that's how they do all of them a character sits down they start singing then eventually it cuts away to unrelated footage like a memory where they're not sitting down it's like no one could think how to just place the characters in an interesting space and then use that space for the song we have to cut away every time and that really hamstrings any intimacy or urgency the song might have had i was also cracking up at the extremely clumsy transition dialogue to take them from speaking to singing there are so many songs in a row where they lead into it by a character prompting evan like i don't suppose you could monologue about this for us no tell us the good things what were the good things you remember right right of course yes of course they were good things tell us something please evan you never noticed anything about me that's not true he's he he knows a lot of things about you like what things it feels so clumsy like imagine if in every musical characters would just go around like tell us what you're about in order to trigger every song and then my favorite every time evan has to transition from speaking to singing the camera comes in really close to him and he looks down bashfully and starts mumbling out the first notes of the song in his trembling falsetto as though uncertain of the facts that he's about to sing i've learned to slam on the break the end of may or early june he said have you ever felt like nobody was there so i just stand here sorry then you launch into a long often repetitive song where nothing happens and you're bored the whole time like after the first verse and chorus you fully understand what the song is trying to convey but then you have to sit through an additional two minutes as a formality because songs have to be song length the most excruciating song is probably the one where evan's mom sings about her devotion to him not to break anyone's heart if that song has deep personal meaning to you but it's so boring but you saw that truck unused my own so wide a real live truck this song at least tells an anecdote but it tells it at a snail pace and with often repeated phrases is there another truck coming to our driveway a truck that will take mommy away and it's melodically uninteresting and you're so close to the story's conclusion by that point and you just want it to end your mom isn't going anywhere your mom is staying right here your mom isn't going anywhere yeah your mom's staying right here i get it okay lady the broadway version has a similarly excruciating song from connor's dad about breaking in a baseball glove the point is he's paternal and evan yearns for that but you know again the song does not justify its run time i'm sure no one was too torn up when that song was cut and speaking of cut songs there's a very unbalanced ratio here of evan songs to non-evan songs other than the baseball glove song they cut two ensemble numbers from an already evan heavy production and he is the main character so fine but the way these songs are distributed throughout the story means that you get long stretches of time where evan appears to be the only musical character in fact it's not until the 30-minute mark that you hear any other characters other than evan sing a single note one of the cut songs was anybody have a map the original opening number i don't like this song very much it kind of sounds like somebody accidentally bought the store brand of next to normal but the biggest point in its favor is that it features all of the important characters singing right off the bat which i would argue is even more important in film a medium in which in this day and age characters bursting into song is already a harder sell that number could have been sort of an ice breaker to the idea of these characters being characters who sing as the show is laid out now you kind of get lulled into this sense that all of the songs might come from evan like the songs are just his internal monologue and he is the only one who will be singing sort of like disney's tarzan but instead of phil collins it's a creepy old man this also makes the film's second song for forever unintentionally comedic because you've got evan sitting at the table with connor's family having a normal conversation over dinner and then he suddenly starts singing out his warbly little opening notes picture perfect afternoon we share and none of them are singing they're all still talking around him and he's physically so close to them and he's singing right at them he keeps getting louder and louder he looks around and says to me there's nowhere outside rather be and i say he seems like a bizarre interloper an adult man in a halloween costume of one of the stranger things kids who came in and just started singing at this baffled unsuspecting family part four sincerely me evan decides to continue the misunderstanding with the murphy family by making it appear as though he and connor were close friends so he needs to forage a fake email history between him and conor he goes to jared his friend from school for help and then there's a musical number about writing these fake emails called sincerely me it's a comedic musical number as they second guess what they're writing and banter back and forth and conor reappears from the dead to act out all the silly messages they're writing i thought i hated this song on the broadway soundtrack but i think what i actually hated is the voice broadway performers do when they're doing a funny song you know suddenly they start singing like this as though unconfident that the lyrics will convey that the song is meant to be funny if they don't do a crazy character voice i call it the avenue q voice but avenue q is like the only one that gets a pass because at least they're puppets like there's a reason that they're talking like that anyway in the broadway version they are all doing it on this track in fact jared in particular is doing full avenue q voice the entire play rendering it honestly one of the most unwatchable performances i've ever encountered in any work a letter to yourself what the crap does that even mean why are you talking to me about this in the film this number is just performed normally so as a sequence in isolation it's actually really working for me this guy that plays conor is super charismatic in it and this is one of his only scenes in the film so quick question did any of you guys know that there was an off-broadway musical adaptation of the movie heathers it opened in los angeles in 2013. i mention it because heather's the musical and dear evan hansen share some superficial similarities they're both set in high school obviously they both feature suicide as a prominent plot element and they both feature forged letters from the dead for personal gain but that's really where it ends i see heather's as almost a shadow of dear evan hansen heather's is a black comedy whereas dear evan hansen is painfully sentimental you can see this best in their respective memorial scenes another thing that they both have heathers emphasizes the crass media circus around the suicide and the romanticization of it while dear evan hansen plays it totally straight but having said all that it's of note that heather's the musical features a song where the protagonist and her boyfriend are writing a fake suicide note and joking around the whole time and their dead classmate stands up and starts singing out the words they're writing for her and it's a whole comedy number so i'm not saying the story's entire premise was stolen or anything but given how totally out of place sincerely me feels with the rest of this musical i can't help but wonder whether the writers just like saw a performance of heathers and were like hey we should have a song like that that'd be funny but the thing is remember heathers is a black comedy and evan hansen is decidedly not in heathers the characters are saying and doing awful things basically the whole time there's assault there's actual murder there are jokes about all kinds of taboo subjects and i'm not saying that heather's the musical even covers any of their subject matter in ways that i particularly like but i'm saying their tone is internally consistent and then evan hansen really just has this one number and it's totally different from everything else in the show and it feels really weird tonally it's completely baffling in the context of the movie especially after you reach the conclusion and you look back on it in the wake of the entire extremely grim second act because this sequence really screams black comedy this is a creepy thing that they're doing so it's not great that they find it so funny it's ghoulish the way conor's grinning corpse comes along for the number dancing in a crazy way to indicate that he's just a puppet for all the silly dialogue they're writing mere days after his depressing suicide and there are a lot of dark comedic musicals where characters do naughty things and then have an upbeat kind of villain song reveling in how naughty they're being if you just heard sincerely me in isolation you would probably assume that this was that kind of show so as a first-time viewer when this song comes on it seems as though the story is about to take its first dramatic turn into evan's role as an anti-hero you assume that his intentions are becoming less pure that he's getting swept up in the lie or the attention that he's getting and then you assume it'll all escalate from there it'll probably come to a head at the end of act one and then come crashing down later so he can be punished or learn his lesson or whatever but no immediately after this song they reel evan back in to a stuttering reserved sensitive boy it makes no sense there's not a single other song with this tone in the whole rest of the show all it does is serve to make evan look really callous and disingenuous when he acts so soft and innocent for the remainder of the story this scene forces you to consider maybe evan is not a nice boy maybe he's just a quiet boy and that makes him much less sympathetic yet the issue is never addressed or resolved part 5 the romance with the sister evan's love interest is zoe the dead kid's sister and if i had the power to change one thing about dear evan hansen one of my first story notes would be do not give him a crush on zoe evan has three motives in this charade actually instead of numbers i'll give them letters because we're already in a numbered list number a he does not want to disappoint the grieving parents number b he craves the acceptance of this loving perfect family and number c he wants to get close to zoe this girl that he has a crush on from afar but doesn't really know that well motive a is selfless motive b is selfish but is also sad and easier to empathize with motive c is both selfish and vaguely sinister starting this specifically romantic relationship on the basis of an extremely inappropriate lie i do think the character of zoe is a worthy addition to the story and the romantic connection between she and evan adds a layer of drama to the lie because there are higher stakes if he's found out but in my opinion evan should not have a crush on zoe or any significant interactions with her prior to conor's death he's coming around to the house all the time anyway on the request of her parents so i feel like they could have just formed a natural bond in a way that felt a little less orchestrated by evan's deceit that would strip his motives down to only a and b which makes him seem a lot less self-serving as a character and ultimately makes him a more likable guy evan shares two songs with zoe and they're both awful first we have if i could tell her which is so conceptually bad on every level in this song zoe is like my dead brother didn't even love me and evan is like sure he did and she's like really can you list some things he said to you about me maybe in some kind of song and then evan threw the guise of connor's words lists a bunch of things that he noticed about zoe while he was crushing on her from afar this is awful for a lot of reasons first zoe had an extremely fraught relationship with her brother suggested to have at times even been physically abusive he was struggling how about the time he tried to punch through my door screaming at the top of his lungs saying he was gonna kill me for no reason wow i can't believe he told her it was for no reason i'm not trying to roast connor he was clearly written to be dealing with his own mental health problems which seemed significant but that doesn't undo the damage he's done to his sister and she will now never get closure on that relationship so zoe has just told evan that she fears her dead brother never cared about her and all evan can think about is this dumb crush on her second this moment is even more disturbing knowing that evan's lie will inevitably eventually be revealed to zoe zoe seems shyly pleased by what evan is saying in this song suggesting that she believes him and that maybe it makes her feel a little better so knowing that eventually this is going to be taken away from her and she's going to be forced to question everything she started to believe about her relationship with her brother is cruel of evan who is fully aware of what he's doing in this scene third and most obviously most of the things evan's listing sound implicitly romantic he thought it looked pretty cool when you put indigo streaks in your hair these are not the kind of things you want to hear that your brother has noticed about you and remarked on to his buddies often enough that they retained all of them i think at best zoe in this scene is thinking like well he's dead so i guess we'll never have to unpack this did anyone who wrote this song have siblings how did they think this would be cute fourth he's so intense and his eyes are really bugging out and he keeps lurching closer to her face i just have to highlight this shot because i find it viscerally terrifying it makes my animal brain start shaking in fear trying to flee from the presence of a predator anyway evan and zoey have a second song together only us this song is just boring they've had like three scenes together by the time of their love song three scenes utterly devoid of chemistry and suddenly zoe says she's romantically interested in him and then they sing the most generic love song ever and we get a clumsy montage of them on dates there's nothing real to anchor us to this relationship it's all done in shorthand part six his best friend died you won't believe what he did next this is the big scene the one everybody is meant to be inspired by you know that song this is me from the greatest showman this is the evan hansen version of that and i mean that literally this is the same songwriting duo and they are remarkably similar songs [Music] so evan has agreed to speak at conor's memorial at first it's a disaster he stutters he fumbles he drops all his note cards whoa the scene is incredible i love that the writers clearly felt that we needed an explanation for why the audience would have their phones out and recording they can't just pull their phones out because the speech is going well that doesn't make sense apparently so instead they all jeeringly take out their phones to film evan when he drops his note cards like they think that this is good content yeah guys that's really funny i'm sure that's going to perform well on tick tock send it into america's funniest home videos flustered child makes fool of himself after a friend dies by suicide but then he rallies he speaks from the heart and his speech ends up being so beautiful so moving that they posted online for being good instead of embarrassing and it changes the world to us evan is singing a pop song but in the universe of the story evan is giving some kind of beautiful speech which we aren't privy to it's like how the one direction song best song ever is only about a best song ever which we the audience don't get to hear we hear snippets of evan's speech and uh not to grade him too harshly but they seem pretty unremarkable to show me that i wasn't alone nobody is that's that's the gift that he gave all of us and the lyrics of the song certainly aren't remarkable it's just repeating different iterations of you're not alone over and over this wig is in my eyeball [Music] you will be fine [Music] i guess we'll just assume that he said all the amazing parts while we were looking the other way but i really do want to know the content of this speech mainly so i can understand this girl's reaction there's a place where we don't have to feel unknown oh my god i can't think of any memorial speech for a dead child that would make me go oh my god i've heard a lot of people say the movie gets this song all wrong this song is meant to be a sort of villain song it's supposed to feel schmaltzy and disingenuous and sinister because it's in universe propaganda from evan that's the point and i disagree with that i think the broadway show does characterize evan differently and does make his actions a bit more sinister throughout the entire play but i still believe that this song is intended to be fully earnest in the stage show you might ask how can that be how can they make evan behave so selfishly but still expect us to be so moved by his cheesy empowering pop song with extremely generic lyrics and the answer is because it's not a very good play you guys i think that a lot of the nuance that the viewers were seeing in this play were just wishful thinking and projection on their part because i think this play just fails to examine a lot of the complexities of its own premise but anyway broadway show aside there is absolutely no doubt in the film as to whether this sequence is sincere it's the most trite and sincere part of the whole thing part 7 the stupid kickstarter evan's classmate alana who also has anxiety decides that they should start an organization called the connor project to honor his memory evan made up a lie about how this random orchard was conor's favorite place in the world but the orchard closed down so now the connor project's main goal is just running a kickstarter page to try to raise a hundred thousand dollars to reopen the orchard i don't know enough about orchards but that number doesn't sound right to me i don't even fully understand the process by which an orchard closes down like i kind of imagine it was owned by a farmer and then the farmer died or didn't make enough money and stopped maintaining the walkways or something the orchard is still there so what will this money do will it manifest a new farmer how long can it keep the orchard open who owns this orchard i ask because suddenly the kickstarter becomes like the central drama to the entire plot and it's extremely weird the kids keep holding meetings for the connor project which when alana pitched it i'd kind of imagined it would be like a group therapy circle kind of thing you know kids who had previously been very secretive or embarrassed about their mental health issues could come together and feel seen maybe work together to help establish community resources i mean they have one line that mentions support groups but it's so obviously adr that they added after the fact because they realized it was really weird i'm beyond excited to announce that in addition to our support groups we will be launching a kickstarter campaign we never see any sign of these support groups and they're never mentioned again the meetings we see seem entirely dedicated to talking strategy about how best to market their kickstarter for their godforsaken orchard alana voices her belief that the orchard is of great symbolic import the viral success of evan's speech again the speech contents we don't even know proves that the world cares about mental health and people's willingness to donate to the kickstarter is a manifestation of that when the virality of evan's speech begins to fade and it looks like they might not meet the kickstarter goal alana starts absolutely freaking out she's like your speech told the world that people care about kids with mental illness now all these depressed kids are following the connor project on instagram watching our campaign if the orchard doesn't hit its funding goal they'll realize your dumb speech was all a lie and they're all going to kill themselves they'll have nothing left to keep living for and it's like what what are you talking about when all this stuff was brought into the story i became convinced that narratively it was imperative that the kickstarter not hit its funding goal and then the characters involved would be forced to realize that doing a social media campaign and a symbolic project are not actually the solution that you need but no actually alana's bonkers claim is never challenged by the characters in story or by the narrative itself so apparently we're meant to accept her reasoning and that the orchard kickstarter comes with real and high stakes if we raise one hundred thousand dollars and open an old orchard we will change the world but if we raise only 80 000 all these kids will immediately kill themselves alana if that's the case you really should have gone with a flexible funding campaign and then at least only a proportional fraction of teens would be suicidal and to further narratively suggest that alana was right we never find out what the consequences would have actually been because the orchard does in fact get fully funded we the audience can't even be sure that conor cared about this orchard all that much we know that he did go there as a kid with his family but the idea that he ever returned to the orchard or that it was his favorite place was an invention by evan but then the closing scene of the film takes place at the orchard zoe praises the orchard and says it helped her family and that it's beautiful you see a lot of kids hanging out there and bustling around doing orchard things evan sits there in a moment of beautiful tranquility so in the language of the film the orchard is a net good alana established that she was willing to do whatever it took to fund the orchard even morally questionable things which we will circle back to later and in this way the orchard feels like a thematic extension of evan's lie it's all about the end justifying the means right alana thinks it's okay to do unkind or morally wrong things to fund the orchard because the orchard will help depressed kids in some undefined way and well that's the same thing evan's telling himself about his whole connor lie it's wrong but it's helping conor's family grieve it's helping depressed kids everywhere and apparently the film thinks yeah that's right it was all worth it or the film thinks trees are nice and just didn't think about anything beyond that level part eight the jared character has no point and makes no sense i told you in my synopsis that evan has no friends and he doesn't but also jared is his friend they have this running joke where jared keeps insisting that they're only family friends like their moms or co-workers and want them to hang out but evan seems to confide in and have a rapport with jared we never see jared ditching evan to hang out with his preferred friend group at lunch in fact at lunch i think jared just disappears because they couldn't reconcile this fact so anyway it seems like they're just actual friends in the stage version jared's whole function as a character is to make homophobic jokes about how evan and connor being pen pals would be kind of gay that's like the exact formula for a secret gay high school lover one of those secret email accounts sure for sending pictures of your penises including a whole song where he keeps making homophobic jokes and then evan says no homo alot [Music] [Music] you can tell the producers like realize that this might be a problem but didn't want to make a bunch of changes to the script especially to lyrics of songs so their solution was pretty gutsy they just left jared's homophobic dialogue unaltered but made him gay i'm sorry well my bump dominated and captured the flag and i got the second base below the brawl with this girl from israel was gonna like be in the army so i was camp well i put on 13 pounds of pure muscle also i hooked up with this brazilian dude who is literally a supermodel it turns out if you want to have homophobic jokes in your movie you can just have a fictional gay man say them and then nobody gets to complain you think you're lovers you realize that right oh my god jared is such a lame character he feels like he was written in like 2005 when just saying the word gay was enough to constitute a joke it's the same joke in every scene evan will say something innocuous and then jared will be like that sounds pretty gay he doesn't sound like that in the movie i'm just traumatized from the stage version the worst jared joke is the one in this scene it drives me crazy a letter to yourself i mean what is that like some kind of sex thing no no it's not a sex thing that doesn't even make sense that's the part where you're like right they're not even trying actually i guess the movie has multiple parts where you say that anyway jared effectively exits the movie after the first act they try to like cut to reaction shots of him periodically to show that he's still around but there's no point they've clearly run out of ideas for his character in the montage of evan and zoe dating each other they give jared a single surly looking reaction shot like he's missing his buddy or feeling neglected or something and it's like that's not even your buddy at your own insistence you don't hang out you don't even eat together at lunch instead you just vanish from this plane of existence i think it's so funny that at the end of the movie evan is trying to make amends and honor conor's memory and he's mailing out videos of connor that he's unearthed he's sending them to his loved ones and inexplicably he sends one to jared what does jared get out of this jared seemed ambivalent at best to all of this drama they literally just got to him because they forgot to wrap up his character's storyline part nine the stuff i liked i thought the kid that played conor was pretty good he was only on screen for a few cumulative minutes but he really sells the character especially in that scene where he talks to evan at the beginning he starts out earnestly trying to make conversation with evan he seems to feel guilty for snapping at him earlier and is awkwardly trying to make a connection he accidentally hurts evan's feelings and then he looks mad at himself then a minute later he gets paranoid he flies into a rage he's got tears in his eyes you only really get this one scene with the real connor before he dies and i feel like it pretty well conveyed how tormented this kid is and then in sincerely me when he's playing the imaginary version of conor he's got a really contagious energy i liked the sound editing on the vocals i think this film used a blend of the studio recorded vocals with moments of live singing in the filming environments where that was possible and i think the way that they blended the two sounds very natural also even when it's the studio track they have like reverb on it so it sounds environmentally correct they do that thing where if a character is singing and they move toward the camera they get louder which a lot of movie musicals actually don't bother doing so i always appreciate that it always feels like even if their vocals sound really auto-tuned like julianne moore there's not another truck in the driveway at least it sounds like it's coming out of their mouth i liked this one shot where evan has to like smile sarcastically and it gets his eyes to do the smiling eyes thing right before it cuts i thought that was cute and also that is some highly precise control of your eye smiling muscles i liked the way ilana performed her song which was added for the film i didn't like the song nor did i really like her character in this film who felt very poorly developed but i liked her performance it didn't feel like she was trying to belt for her life like ben platt was there was a great quiet vulnerability to the way she sang it you could tell she wanted the acting to take precedence over the vocals sounding clean i liked that in this scene zoe warns evan not to park in the street at her house or he'll get a ticket and then in this fight you see that julianne moore has gotten a ticket when she goes up to her car will you please go oh my god are you kidding me set up and pay off okay that's it part 10 the editing the editing of this movie is at times unfathomable let's take a look at this moment the moment where evan accidentally prints his therapy letter at school he finishes typing his letter he stares intently at the screen he calls up the print window the print settings screen pops up he slowly and deliberately drags his mouse over to the print button close up on the print button he clicks it then he signs out look at his blank expression while he's doing it like a demon possessed his body and compelled him to print that actually that does seem like something a demon would do like that's pretty funny then after a beat too long he makes a startled face realizing an apparent mistake then he has a conversation with connor slowly walks over to the printer there's no explanation of how he could have even made this mistake they don't make him look distracted they don't have it play out quickly there's no sense of urgency of him rushing to the printer to try to intercept it after he realizes what he's done it makes you as a viewer say what just happened how did that happen which is usually a good indicator that you've seen some bad editing there's this song where the murphy family are all singing about how conor is dead and it's cutting between them as they sing each part but near the end of the song they all sing together and you can feel the editor completely lose confidence in what they should do clearly they realize that a split screen would feel tacky so they opt for floating translucent faces which for the record is also tacky zoe sings the line when the villains fall the kingdoms never weep which is just bad writing it's not bad editing i just wanted to point it out and then we get to the end of the song my favorite shot all three family members must sing the final note and the editor has no idea what to do so they make the wild choice to just cut to this sitcom looking exterior shot of the house and you hear them all singing inside [Music] it's very hannah montana [Music] the montage where evan goes viral is just in general on fire in the editing room but i want to highlight this one incredible shot we have a big field of all the people tweeting and vlogging about evan's speech flying through space and boom a collage of connor's face very subtle very tasteful oh this isn't strictly an editing thing but i didn't know where else to mention it maybe it counts as an editing thing because they could have chosen not to use this take in the scene where evan's mom sings her song he gives her a big hug and a kiss at the end and i literally screamed in fear watching it because for a horrifying moment it looks like evan is going to kiss his mom on the mouth i just wanted to make sure you all see that because i had to i also have to mention this part where he's too shy to talk to zoey so he naruto runs away part 11 the lie the central tension for most of the film is the lie that evan is telling which you know will eventually be found out you're slogging through the whole film waiting for the other shoe to drop and as you're watching it feels like evan's lie could be revealed in any number of ways after all he says that he and conor went to specific places in the very first scene where he lies we see him slip up by not knowing that the orchard closed down years before but they kind of gloss over that for him and he says he just went to a closed orchard and then in the same scene he names a specific ice cream place so like that place could have turned out to be closed down years before too any tiny detail in his fake stories could catch him out in this lie at one point alana says i worked with connor on a project did he ever tell you and evan says no conor never mentioned it but what if evan became too comfortable in his lie and just started agreeing to prompts like that someone could easily use something like that to catch him out if they were suspicious but no the series of events that lead to his lie being revealed are so contrived and nonsensical so alana confronts evan demanding to know whether he lied the first thing that actually makes her suspicious is that evan has been spending all of his time dating zoe instead of helping with the stupid kickstarter campaign so alana is like any real friend would have been helping more on the kickstarter and that is both incredibly unkind and makes no sense because if zoe has been with evan zoe has also not been helping with the kickstarter so what are you going to accuse her of lying about being conor's sister too because she doesn't care enough about your stupid kickstarter so evan says she's got it all wrong and anyway she has no proof she's got nothing on him but then and i'm not kidding she says oh by the way also the month that you said you broke your arm doesn't match up and it's like well alana why didn't you lead with that then that seems like a much more solid piece of evidence and if that's the case why didn't tons of people notice that and also if that's the case how on earth did evan make that mistake like the story about breaking his arm with conor was a barely adapted version of the real story of how he broke his arm so first of all why would he say a month and second why would he randomly change the month how would he get that wrong so anyway evan has been caught in his mistake and he panics and he says no i'll prove it to you i'll prove we were friends and then he pulls out his phone and goes check your email he's sitting six inches away from her but he has sent her an email and she looks and he sent her a pdf of the dear evan hansen letter conor's supposed suicide note and then evan goes you have to promise never to show this to anybody only conor's family and i know about it which that's news to me not to be that guy but plot hole alert if evan and connor were never actually friends why were other students and by other students i mean literally alana coming up to evan and offering condolences the day that connor died hey i'm so sorry what the hell was that i don't know that scene was before the assembly before the student body found out that evan and connor were supposed to be friends in fact it was even before he went to connor's family's house and doubled down on the lie it doesn't make any sense i have found a plot hole so anyway just based on context clues i had assumed that the note was public the whole time but it actually has not been turns out it's a big secret which is fair a suicide note is a very sensitive document so okay but also if it's so secret why did he email it to her she's right there why did he do that why didn't he just hold up his phone and show her right in front of her face in the play a lot of the conversations that are in real life and the film happened over instant messenger including this one so sending a pic was like the only way to get it to her although he could have used snapchat but anyway the movie had them talking in person and i guess just made their piece with the fact that the scene wouldn't make any sense but alana agrees to keep it a secret and now believes evan that he was conor's best friend but then alana goes home and thinks you know leaking the suicide note could be just the thing i need to fund my stupid kickstarter that is a morally okay thing for me to do because funding this kickstarter will end suicide forever so she puts the note on instagram and you're like okay that's evil of her i guess but that's not the end of the world maybe the murphy family will be mad at evan for sharing the note but he can just explain what happened that he got betrayed by a trusted friend i'm sure they'll understand but then somehow the leaked suicide note also goes viral and for some reason leads to conor's family being cancelled the suicide note somehow indicates that they are a bad family and they are now canceled on reddit and twitter and also they've been doxxed somehow i mean we heard the contents of this note in the first scene and they're all just very general statements about being lonely and sad i wish i was different i wish i was part of something i wish that anything i said mattered to anyone but it doesn't there's no indication of any wrongdoing at all on the part of the family other than a vague implication that conor might have had incestuous feelings for his sister but the plot demands it and so the murphy family are canceled on twitter and within an hour of this happening are receiving threatening phone calls to their house so then evan goes over and he sees the house is in chaos the stress has driven the family apart and they're all fighting they're blaming themselves for conor's death they're blaming each other their loving home is destroyed so then and only then to end this family argument evan confesses and he confesses by mumbling his way into a falsetto little song so i just stand here sorry searching for something to say and so begins my favorite sequence of the film for evan's big confession song none of the other characters have singing parts so hear me out it perfectly facilitates an interpretation of the scene where evan is singing in real life just imagine it you've got a sweaty steve from blues clues in your house and you find out he's been lying about knowing your dead relative for months making up elaborate stories based on your own real family memories how frightening how violating and in the moment of confrontation he starts weeping and singing a little ditty that day at the orchard you encounter at the orchard words fail words fail [Music] there's nothing i [Music] on stage a character can physically step away from the action of the scene move toward the audience and face them when they do this implicitly you understand that they are likely not saying these exact words as dialogue in the scene they are just singing about their emotions but the editor keeps cutting back to conor's family's bewildered faces every moment these people who clearly are not interested in evan's self-pitying explanation for why he's done this weird terrible thing i never had the dad who stuck it out no corny jokes or baseball gloves it cuts from evan's trillion vibrato to the family's aggressively unamused faces not at all in the mood to hear his cabaret performance the murphys occasionally interject with follow-up questions but they're speaking not singing they're just talking like normal people and then evan comes right back in singing his heart out periodically cutting back to the family's faces of horror and disgusting i think it's time for you to go hands down best scene in the movie part 12 is evan the bad guy yes okay no so look when connor's parents first confront evan he tries to clear up the misunderstanding they invite him over to dinner and weedle stories out of him and he starts making stuff up and gets kind of swept up in it he takes his own real story about falling out of a tree at the national park where he was volunteering and breaking his arm and he spins it into some kind of beautiful friendship adventure he had with connor at the orchard he imagines the perfect friendship and you can see him getting emotional imagining that he has this kind of friend in his life so at first you can give evan the benefit of the doubt as the film is clearly trying to but when you look at the totality of his lie and how long it goes on and the victims of that lie i don't think loneliness is a good enough excuse for this level of deception especially with the degree to which he inserts himself into the murphy family's day-to-day lives and perhaps worst of all when he tells these fake stories and these fake emails he is mischaracterizing conor who is a real person who is now dead conor's family understood him so little when he was alive they feel like they barely knew him and in actuality he didn't leave any kind of note and evan is all too eager to step in and invent new stories and put words into conor's mouth so in that way evan's fake memories of conor are not only misrepresenting this dead boy but they're also effectively replacing the real memories of conor that his loved ones had and maybe evan's fake version of conor is more idealized and easier to grieve you don't have as many complicated feelings about it but that's not really a decision that evan gets to make and that's not to mention how in evan's stories evan portrays himself as heroic he always says the right thing he always gives the right advice so it's not all selfless he's building himself up and simultaneously erasing this real dead boy rewriting his whole life and personality to fit evan's narrative and that's bad the broadway show is at least a little more willing to confront these darker aspects of its own characters broadway jared is actually kind of evil he's like manufacturing these pin back buttons in memory of conor just so he can sell them at school for a profit and then jared decides that he wants to make himself part of the lie and starts trying to write himself into the fake emails and evan has to tell him no contrast that to movie jared who is gay to make his gay jokes in the first act seem more toothless and then he just kind of disappears from the story he doesn't have any of these more evil tendencies broadway alana seems to be some kind of tired spoof of twitter activism where she's overselling how well she knew connor and making up hashtags in a bid for attention movie alana is tormented by anxiety and seemingly well intentioned motivated only by how much of herself she sees in conor and a desire to help other mentally ill kids also in the broadway version the thing that tips her off to evan's lie is that in the fake emails conor seemed to be getting better which means his suicide didn't make sense you can tell they consulted zero therapists in actuality if someone is depressed for a very long time they will sometimes seem in higher spirits when they're planning a suicide attempt because they feel like they're taking action and the end is near and they're kind of energized by this idea so for that reason a lot of people misread the signs and think they're getting better and they don't understand what that happiness was coming from until it's too late but anyway in the show that was just a mistake on evan's part it was a plot hole that alana noticed because then evan is literally like oh no she's right we have to write more emails where conor seems more suicidal which in itself is a really grim concept evan is a bit different in the play too broadway evan is a little less bumbling and a little more a master of his own fate in the movie the idea that conor has secret email accounts is like a guess that his parents make that evan just goes along with but in the play it was actually evan's idea there's a song in the broadway show called disappear which was cut entirely from the film in it evan realizes that the community's interest over conor's suicide is starting to wane so evan is about to lose the notoriety that he gained for being the dead kid's friend in a desperate bid to regain relevance evan himself creates the conor project and appoints himself as president he suggests that they give a school-wide assembly in conner's memory knowing that that's going to get the attention of the student body back on conor's suicide he says that the school band should be a part of the assembly because he has a crush on zoe who's in the band and he wants to leverage her dead brother to force her to be around him after his failed attempt to kiss her made things awkward between them in the movie the assembly is a memorial and evan is guilted into giving a speech by conor's mom the connor project is arranged by other students in response to evan's amazing speech the film deliberately removes evan's agency in all the worst parts of his life the show has way more fake emails in the movie you feel like he just writes that one crop of them and sends them out but in the play he keeps writing new ones pretty much the entire time and they get more and more homophobic and they also make fun of addicts in rehab in the play evan kisses zoey at an inappropriate time in her dead brother's bedroom and she's horrified and yells at him in the film at that point they go in for a mutually agreed-upon kiss on the couch in the play when zoey finally wants to date evan there's a scene where she explicitly says that her romantic interest in him is gratitude for him giving her brother back and then they kiss passionately the film removes that scene and it only gives the two a song where she insists that she has lots of other reasons for being interested in him which must have all happened off-screen there's a scene in the broadway show i want to mention where evan at the height of his popularity from the conor thing tells his mom that he doesn't need refills of his anxiety and depression medications because he doesn't need them anymore the implication being that popularity has cured his mental illness i thought at the time that he was being an unreliable source and that later there would be some kind of big story fallout to him randomly going off his meds but um it never comes back so i think we were supposed to take it at face value i can't even begin to unpack that unlike movie evan who pretty much only comes clean because he sees that his lie is hurting the murphy family broadway evan's confession came after it was already clear that his lie was collapsing in on him like the music was escalating multiple characters were trying to catch him out and questioning his story they kind of frame it like he was about to be found out anyway so he didn't have that much of a choice i'm sure all these comparisons and seeming complexities make it sound like i think the broadway version is better but i really don't the broadway version does bring in a lot of components that are more complex than what we see in the film but it's not really prepared to wrap any of them up and it doesn't seem to even really try evan might have been a more interesting character in that his actions were a little more willfully immoral but then the play goes ahead and gives him a huge pass at the end in the broadway version evan's deception is never revealed i mean he tells the murphys but then they decide to keep it a secret and zoe even tells him that he saved her parents and the community needed the lie so in that version as far as the world is concerned evan's fictionalized version of conor is canon it's the way he'll always be remembered and evan made a little mistake but that's okay who cares the film makes evan serve a little more penance the murphys explicitly say they're not going to tell anyone he was lying because they're worried about his mental health she doesn't want to ruin your life she's afraid you'll do something stupid but then evan decides to tell everyone he makes that choice voluntarily but the film punishing evan a little more doesn't really help because it's equally shy about confronting whether evan was actually really wrong in the first place they try to remove his agency at every turn and make him just a quiet confused soft boy who seems to have just stumbled into this whole deception as some kind of big mistake movie evan is mostly just a victim of circumstance okay so to answer the question is evan the bad guy yes he's certainly the bad guy of this narrative but is he a bad guy also probably yes i guess he reminds me of the woman at the center of that documentary the woman who wasn't there about a woman who lied about being a 911 survivor and appointed herself to a leadership role in a support group for actual survivors and made up fake relationships with the victims of the attacks who couldn't contradict her stories because they were dead this woman tanya head she didn't actively hurt anyone and she didn't profit financially from her lies she just got attention and sympathy and a community surely her actions were driven by a deep loneliness but she exploited other people's real deaths to glorify herself and the people she burdened with her need for compassion were people who were themselves struggling to cope with loss and tragedy people who were then forced to feel new pain at learning that this person they had welcomed and confided in wasn't who she said she was and that's probably why every reaction i've ever seen to tanya's story has been unanimously negative evan at least has in his favor that he's really young teenagers do stupid things and they can be held a little less accountable for them except of course this version of evan looks like he has three kids and a mortgage the dear evan hansen movie honestly feels like propaganda written by evan hansen himself where he's saying yes okay i made up this big scam but look it was only ever for the right reasons i'm a very sad little boy part 13 nothing happens they half-heartedly introduce a lot of story threads but when you actually examine them very few are resolved there are so many moments where you think the story is about to take some kind of decisive turn and it just doesn't insincerely me you think evan is about to take a slightly more villainous turn and then the song ends and evan is still just a well-intentioned soft boy when the memorial speech goes viral you think evan is about to develop an ego about all this ah you think now will be his villainous turn but that doesn't happen either he stays the same the only impact the viral video has on the plot is the inception of the stupid kickstarter in the montage where evan is ditching his friends to date zoe i mentioned that there was that shot of jared looking bitter you think there will be repercussions for that you're like oh jared is the only other person that knows about the lie he helped write the emails maybe he's going to blackmail evan or you know reveal the lie out of spite or something that story threat is a little more overtly threatened in the play like jared outright says he's thinking about doing it and then evan is like no mutually assured destruction you helped with the emails too you're gonna look bad too and then it's just kind of dropped but at least they thought about it but in the film that never comes up and jared doesn't matter in the second act at all there's a scene between evan and connor's mom where she takes him into connor's room and she tells like a sad story about how he got a little suit tailored when he was 13 but he didn't get invited to any bar mitzvahs i expected in that scene that evan might share some detail of his own loneliness sometime that he was excluded like open up to her on a real level but he didn't similarly there's another scene between evan and conor's dad evan says that conor was lucky to have a dad like him and then conor's dad is like your dad must be pretty proud of you and i thought oh evan is going to open up to him about his sad relationship with his father who never visits him or calls and incidentally in that scene in the play that is what happens evan tells the truth but instead when asked about his dad movie evan just brushes it off the reason i care about this is i feel like evan communicating with these people at all showing them any aspect of his personality or his sad life anything that makes him likable would really soften the wrongness of what he's doing in the film by the time evan's lie is revealed you feel like everything the murphys have ever been told about him was part of the lie they can't look back on the past months and say to themselves while his pretense for spending time with us was a messed up lie but we've really gotten to know him we know that he's a good kid we know his heart you know something which would probably help them make peace with all this drama instead he's not only wronged them but he's a stranger to them if i were them i would feel frightened looking back on it and processing just how much of what he said was completely made up and another grievance i have is that so many characters end the film in the exact same place where they started so let's look at our cast when we meet the murphys they're struggling with the loss of their son but they still seem affectionate and committed to each other they have an argument near the end of the film which is indirectly evan's fault and then in the epilogue you can see that they're interacting the way we had seen them interact before it doesn't feel like they were brought closer or anything it just kind of seems like they're okay at the beginning of the movie evan's mom is trying to parent him but she's a single mom and she's always busy with work even so she is aware of his mental health situation she's got him in therapy he's on medications and she tries to engage with him in the best way that she's capable at the end of the movie none of that changes but she does apologize to him that because she's a single parent and has to work she can't always be there but it's not like she was neglecting him on purpose it's not like there's anything she could have done differently other than clone herself when we meet zoe she is conflicted because her brother just died they were close when they were kids but then toward the end of his life conor had mental health problems that resulted in him treating her really terribly can she forgive him should she forgive him what does grieving under these circumstances even look like that's a lot to unpack in fact it's a conflict with no easy answers and in itself might have been an interesting topic for some kind of introspective musical but it doesn't matter because they don't try to give us answers in the final scene of the movie she seems to be able to reminisce about him more fondly that's not really a journey we saw her go on it just happened during a time skip and we don't really know why cool problem solved jared starts the movie cold toward evan as i said he keeps insisting they're only family friends they're not real friends you suspect it might just be a sarcastic personality and that he probably does think evan is okay company so i sort of expected their friendship to be solidified over the course of the story but it's not there's this scene at the end at graduation where their moms want them to take a picture together and evan puts his arm around jared and jared looks irritated i sort of thought we'd get one of those cinematic moments where jared initially rolls his eyes but then ultimately embraces evan back indicating that he has formed an affection for him he does think they're friends instead he just brushes him off it's the same thing you would have done at the beginning of the movie no change there we've got alana she believes that this stupid kickstarter is important she believes that people have to donate money to prove that suicide is bad and if they don't they must not care and there is no hope left in the world and this point is never disproven to her the kickstarter gets funded everybody loves it it was a great thing after all i guess she learned that it's wrong to leak suicide notes on instagram against the express wishes of the family of the deceased but that doesn't really feel like a mistake a person makes more than once anyway and then we have evan i haven't forgotten evan after his lie is revealed he drives to the forest where he broke his arm and passionately sings a sad song there's a lot of yelling and crying but in this song very little is resolved it does end on an optimistic note but it's totally unclear to us what mental gymnastics brought him around from total self-loathing to optimism but you're like okay was that song his character resolution but then he goes home and sits in a fetal position in the dark so you're like i guess he's still in a bad place but eventually evan starts trying to make amends he researches conor he reads some of his favorite books including ready player one which i'm sure gave him great insight into how much connor loved pac-man and ferris bueller he unearths a video of conor singing a song and sends off a copy to the murphy family he also sends copies to alana and jared for some reason and he presumably also sends a copy to the academy for their consideration dear evan hansen best original song and over the course of the montage school is over evan is taking a gap here to get a job and then at the end he writes another dear evan hansen letter but this time it's optimistic at the end all of evan's growth happened in a single montage much of it off-screen and apparently without a lick of therapy you could delete the whole middle of this movie and miss nothing except a lot of warbly singing this story fails so badly to be about anything there's nothing said about mental illness other than a gentle reminder that it exists it briefly becomes about internet virality and how the internet can be mean which feels very odd and out of left field when it happens the only thing you can ultimately draw from it is don't lie to be popular which is essentially the plot of every disney channel original movie for the last 20 years and you don't see descendants 2 winning any tonys although it should part 14 trees this movie really likes trees evan himself symbolically is a tree in his very first song he's waving through a window on the outside looking in tapping on the glass this is tree imagery when you're falling in a forest does anybody hear evan is a tree trees are silent they're stuck in place like evan feels as a prisoner to his anxiety so okay evan is a tree where do we go from here not anywhere really the tree motif is not woven throughout it's really only used in two songs evan's first and evan's last and the first is just setting up the motif there's very little done with all this tree stuff and the metaphor is so muddled because other than evan the tree we have this orchard of trees the orchard from the kickstarter remember alana believed that the success or failure of the orchard kickstarter will prove whether people care about depressed kids so surely then the orchard must also be an extension of evan so if the orchard is part of the metaphor i would think that the attention that the community pays to the orchard to the trees should have been what was important but instead the trees just needed monetary donations so what evan needs money i mean i guess evan does need money but that can't be the theme so what if hypothetically instead the kickstarter fails alana is upset about it she thinks all hope is lost but then they see that the community has shown up they've arrived to put in the time and the care that the orchard needs even though they weren't able to donate all the money and then they think wow this problem didn't actually need money but care and then maybe they could make it like a clumsy parallel to how evan's mom is like paying for therapy but not having a lot of genuine conversations with her son because she's too busy you know she's monetarily providing the care that he needs but she's not fully seeing how upset he is or maybe the kickstarter fails but then evan goes out to the orchard to think and he sees that naturally the orchard is like beautiful and it's doing okay without donations and without people fixing it up and then he realizes that even in the parts of his life where he feels alone he can be there for himself and take steps to thrive but no the orchard is funded with money the result of a betrayal so the trees did need money and the money will fix the orchard what does that symbolize and for that matter not to nitpick but like i really would like to know what repairs an orchard needs to get running again you know what does that entail what is the money doing that information matters when the trees are symbolically your protagonist if we understood what the trees needed maybe we would understand what evan needs but the movie refuses to tell us there's so much you can do symbolically with a tree tell us trees need strong roots we'll think oh evan needs a support system that's the point of this rambling story tell us the trees in the orchard need pruning we'll think okay evan needs therapy and he needs to work on himself we don't get any of that most insultingly we get a twist at the end of the film that the reason evan's arm is broken is that over the summer he attempted suicide by jumping out of a tree and i ask why evan can symbolically be a tree without a tree being directly involved in his suicide attempt because that makes no sense that's like somebody attempting suicide by jumping out a second story window it just completely takes you out of what should have been a serious moment in a literal sense it rings false and for what symbolically the tree jumped out of the tree it's symbolically nonsensical and embarrassingly literal so what do the trees mean i said that only two songs featured the tree motif so let's look at the second one evan's last solo number in this song evan goes out to the trees he's around the trees he's looking at trees but lyrically there's no mention of trees our only clue really lies in this one line at the end of the song he keeps repeating step into the sun step into the sun has two possible meanings sun is obviously a homonym for sun and stepping into the sun is essentially what evan has been doing this whole time with the murphys he's been stepping into a surrogate sun roll filling the void that connor left behind almost inheriting conor's college fund but due to the timing of this song as i assume evan's good guy epiphany that would make this a really strange line to place here so i'm going to assume it was unintentional like they just literally didn't notice so no i think this line was meant to be our conclusion to the tree metaphor the sun is being seen and sunlight is also something that trees like it's not much but that's what i think they were trying to do evan was afraid of interacting with people because he didn't want to mess up or find out that they hate who he really is so the solution for him was just to put himself out there step into the sun [Music] but the thing is he has clinical anxiety the point is that he can't do that that's the thing he can't do that's like saying that the cure for anxiety is just don't worry about it if it was really that easy this could have been a one sentence show to me it really says something about the writing that they set up this motif devoted the opening number to it and then abandoned it for the bulk of the show and then at the very end it comes back only for a single sentence and only to set up an unhelpful platitude i guess the broadway version ends with a mini monologue about trees but that one suddenly implies that trees are life evan expresses his hope that depressed kids will climb trees that doesn't really connect either it's a metaphor that's so open-ended it's devoid of all meaning because the writers refuse to anchor it to anything and that really sums up the story i feel like this show did so well at the tonys because it was about mental illness an important topic but that's not enough you know this musical is only about mental illness in the way that it's about trees it mentions them but it's hollow it's hollow like a tree that's my dream metaphor and it's about as complete as the one in the film evan has depression and anxiety and so what what should he do about that or what should society do about that do you have answers for him or advice or just insight of any kind you're left with the impression that they just brought up all these themes for clout because they were ultimately totally unwilling to examine them in any thoughtful way you know i don't think evan was the tree at all i think the movie itself was the tree because it's got nothing to share it's got nothing to say they say that when families suffer a terrible and unexpected loss it can either bring them closer together or drive them farther apart and i think with connor murphy's death it really could have gone either way so in that sense i do agree that evan probably helped them not in the way he thought he helped but i mean like i believe they'll be united in their hatred for evan and that might be a healing experience for them conor's death will be a wound that never heals but i fully believe that the evan hansen incident is something that they can all look back on and laugh someday not a thanksgiving will go by that they aren't roasting him and reminiscing about how deeply inappropriate his ruse was wondering what happened to him comfortable in the knowledge that they will never interact with him again

Channel: Jenny Nicholson

Views: 3,026,435

Keywords:

Id: 8quWUSZCW5g

Length: 77min 3sec (4623 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 12 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/hannibalthellamabal]

Off topic, but I love her giant spider in the background. Anyone know where it’s from?

Edit: I found her video on him because googling is easy.

[u/Amarsir]

Was so happy to see this in my feed earlier. Been way too long without a Jenny Nicholson video.

[u/SlashBolt]

That dumpster fire deserves every second of spite you can manage.

[u/External_Philosopher]

I love Jenny nicholson.. Her video on the hallmark youtube channel is phenomenal

[u/scipiahistory]

"I'm taking a break from working on a 3-hour long video for this"

Oh yes, please. Whatever is coming, I can't wait

[u/n00bvin]

Jenny is cool and I like her deep dives. She knows her shit.

[u/Renovatio_]

I've never seen it.

But I'm still going to watch Jenny's video anyway because I think just has this weird way of making things interesting.

[u/Recent_Peach_2247]

I went to see Shang Chi and the theater. Our previews were the new Venom, Eternals, Dune, Spiderman, Matrix and Dear Evan Hanson. Like wtf? I swear somebody was messing with us. I couldn't even sit through the preview it was so bad.

[u/vapre]

Got-dayum…do not piss off the musical theater nerds.