No, the issue with Dear Evan Hansen is a tone deaf and wall-to-wall cringe of a plot that somehow got a pass on stage.

However, you don’t need to be John Travolta or Olivia Newton-John to lull an audience into a suspension of disbelief. To be sure, there is some definite Steve Buscemi with a skateboard energy to the way Platt hunches his shoulders and quivers his lip, attempting to mimic high school awkwardness and appearing just awkward. This is a huge problem, because without the constant reminder that Evan is young and thereby deeply naïve, the character comes off as heinously selfish.

Platt performs youth earnestly but unconvincingly. No slouched shoulders or downcast eyes can hide that. From his first close-up, his is undeniably one of a full-grown man, who has been comically miscast as a sheepish teen boy. In the film version of Dear Evan Hansen, Ben Platt’s face is a problem. But the attempt to make Platt seem younger somehow renders him both older and inhuman – an act of near-sabotage so distracting it basically renders the movie unrecoverable. the team behind Dear Evan Hansen put Platt in prosthetics and opaque, pasty makeup, along with a curly mop of hair, that strands the actor firmly in the uncanny valley. (It seems relevant to mention that Platt’s father is a producer on the film as Platt said earlier this year in defense of the casting: “Were I not to do the movie, it probably wouldn’t get made.”) It’s horrible.įirst, the decision to have Ben Platt reprise his Tony-winning performance as Evan Hansen in the film, the only original cast member to do so. There are loads of children, and then a disastrously de-aged adult hoofing around in the centre of them looking like somebody has tried to draw a human face on a thumb. Watch the trailer alone and you could be forgiven for thinking that it’s a film about a dangerous pervert with a pathological desire to pose as a child, or a grown man hired by the government to infiltrate a school and tacitly teach the students about the lingering spectre of death.

Cat stands up movie