HOKAY. DEH MOVIE THOUGHTS. I hope there's someone out there who wants nearly 3k words of this.
-> I do have to say this first before I go in on it, but it's really not one of the worst movies I've ever seen, I think a lot of the really low ratings are getting a bit overzealous. the age things fades from consciousness after like 15 mins, the performances are either fine or really quite good, you can only go so wrong with a mellow pop score, and there are a few really good scenes. I think if you go in with no prior deh knowledge (nor a grudge still somehow burning hot from the 2017 tony awards), you'll probably think it's Fine. but, if you do have any prior knowledge, you can easily see how nearly every plot and structure change makes the story worse.
-> the emotional pacing gets kinda fucked up if you start right with "waving through a window," evan's meant to start this day at least kinda hopeful and then loose that hope gradually throughout the day as he talks to people and things don't go well. not the greatest of this movie's sins by all means, but it wasn't a great start.
-> I will say that nik dodani as jared was an absolute joy. king of delivering jokes with good timing and being canonically gay now.
-> removing "anybody have a map" also takes away like half of the material we have with real connor and means we aren't really introduced to zoe until "for forever," so it feels like something's missing when they're so important in those first school scenes. it also takes away our first looks at the murphy parents and the various ways their parenting is flawed, which I think is part of one of the movie's bigger problems: removing/reassigning blame and not letting characters be as flawed as they are in the stage show, but put a pin in that, I'll come back to it later.
-> removing "anybody have a map" also removes heidi's character establishing moments, which is part of a wider problem with how she's portrayed, but put a pin in that, I'll come back to it later.
-> "they were so sad, his parents... his mom was just... I've never seen anyone so sad before" they were so restrained they really did not look that sad bro.
-> they soften alana a lot, which is not a bad thing on it's own, and amandla stenberg does a very nice job in the role, but now her interest in outreach and keeping connor's memory alive is decidedly genuine and altruistic with no other motives mixed in there. where in the musical she has a whole thing about feeling invisible and like no one would notice if she disappeared, and the viewer can maybe extrapolate that she attaches herself to connor's memory as a way of finally getting attention the same way evan does, in the movie she already gets plenty of attention as it is, she has no invisibility problem. again, not a bad thing on its own, but now we've kind of lost that theme of where the line is of people genuinely being affected by a tragedy or attaching themselves to it personal gain. there's a moment where we see some bullies taking a soulful selfie in front of connor's decorated locker, but that's about it with that wider theme.
-> right, here's where things start to get more messy. evan goes to the first dinner at the murphy house fully planning to confess, he doesn't have that bit where jared tells him to "nod and confirm" or anything, neither he nor jared want this to go further. evan goes in, wanting to put everything to rights, and cynthia puts words in his mouth before he has the chance. he hasn't even sat down before she starts saying "connor knew we read his emails, so can you show us the secret accounts you talked to each other with?" (that they would read his private emails at all is breezed by, we almost don't hear larry's "somebody had to be the bad guy," like it's barely relevant), and then when she starts arguing with zoe about if connor was a bad person, she turns right to evan and says "you remember good things about connor, right?" making none of it evan's idea. he isn't seeing cynthia grasping at straws to find a good memory of her son and opening his mouth to fix it, cynthia is now much more self assured and directing this conversation.
-> "sincerely, me" slaps. no two ways about it. it's like they shot everything else first and then remembered "oh shit this is a MUSICAL" and put their whole hearts into having one proper number.
-> I did think the contrast in "requiem" between zoe saying that she doesn't care vs the visual image of her almost crashing her car on purpose was interesting, but I really don't think they needed to add in a depiction of a suicide attempt that wasn't plot necessary and there could have been other ways to show that zoe wasn't as unaffected as she was saying. also the floating heads of all three of them singing together was A Bit funny.
-> "if I could tell her" is mostly unnotable, except they remove the part at the end where evan kisses/tries to kiss zoe (also cutting "I can't BELIEVE you tried to kiss ZOE MURPHY. on her brother's BED. after he DIED." which is a crime on its own), again taking away the first ways evan tries to make this lie work in his self interest.
-> okay. "the anonymous ones" and alana's new material. the song doesn't sound as good as the others in the show, and the lyrics are a little broad and unspecific, but isn't a bad song at all, and I do really like what it does for alana's depth. they remove "disappear" as part of removing imaginary-connor as a whole, and this takes its place, but now this means the connor project isn't evan's idea, it's alana's, and it's purely altruistic. evan only agrees because she's so genuine and really wants to help people, nobody is really making any big mistakes in this situation. they give some good stuff to alana, but it subtracts from the whole and makes the situation less complex.
-> the addition of a big movie sized ensemble does make the wide reach of "you will be found" hit better, it is very tangible how big the connor project explodes, but it also loses much of it's feeling of cynicism, it seems much more heartfelt with no darker undercurrent. also, they remove the kiss between evan and zoe at the end of the song. zoe says "you've given me my brother back" and just hugs him. in the stage show, this is a big character moment for evan, because after zoe kisses him once and you watch him turn away and think "do I want to do this? do I let myself get what I want on the back of all these lies?" before going back in to kiss her again, and here we don't get that at all.
-> right, back to heidi. every scene with her is so much less intense, it feels like she's barely a part of the movie. the scene where she's like "hey, funny thing, I saw a video of you doing a speech about the boy you said you didn't know" has almost no energy behind it. she at no point seems confused or angry or stressed, she's very unaffected, and evan in turn doesn't have her stress and frustration to react off of. he's just like "yeah it wasn't true when I said I didn't know him" and she's like "ah right. see you later." that entire emotional core and back-and-forth between them is just Gone.
-> the song "to break in a glove" itself is cut, but we still have the scene of larry showing evan baseball stuff to sell for the orchard. in the show, larry bought the baseball glove for connor as something he thought connor should like, demonstrating how he gets stuck in how he thinks things ought to work, trying to force it, but ending up making it worse, but in the movie it's a genuine act of reaching out. he explains that, the first time he met connor when connor was like five or something, larry was really nervous about getting on with the kids, but connor took to him immediately and asked to play catch, so this was larry trying to reference that and reconnect properly. flaws removed!
-> "only us" just. makes NO sense. as it's played in the movie, it's zoe showing up at evan's house to propose starting a relationship (WHERE is "I don't even know if we're ~dating officially or whatever~"), but the song's lyrics are? so clearly about an established relationship? and then we get a montage of them doing romantic activities during the song and it's unclear if they're trying to say that actually psych they've been together for a while, that those events happen after somehow, or those are imagined moments of a potential future. I would say the third option, but it's also intercut with alana and jared waiting for evan to turn up to connor project meetings, so they must be happening at some point and. ?????
-> as with every other heidi scene, the part with her at the murphy house is SO underwhelming. it's so awkward and intense on stage, showing how heidi is embarrassed and caught off guard and feels ambushed by this sudden offer by these strangers who seem to know her and her son's lives very well, but there's none of that in her in the movie scene. in the movie, she's cool and unaffected. it seems like she's turning down the offered money for no reason, like she really means that she doesn't want evan thinking he can just accept "handouts." it also makes the argument she and evan have afterwards feel really unearned.
-> ooooh man the glaring absence of "good for you." I get that this would be a difficult one to execute on film, but they could have at least written a new song or scenes to serve the same purpose. jared kind of all but disappears after "you will be found," he's in some montages but I don't think he has any more lines, so we don't get any tension at all between him and evan at this point. with no big angry song and no "did you fall or did you let go" scene, we don't have evan getting desperate to keep it all together, so it again feels unearned that evan just hands over the letter to alana. she asks once "hey was this even true?" and he sends her the file pretty much instantly, which is even weirder given that this scene now happens in person instead over a call and he could easily have just shown her on his own phone.
-> alana also takes at least a couple of hours before uploading the letter, making it much less an impulse decision. she has a reprise of her song before she does it, so you get a feeling that she is still kind of doing it out of desperation to help people feel less alone, but it feels like a much worse decision when she takes all that time to consider it first.
-> the fight between larry and cynthia before "words fail" feels very strange, because they still have a lot of lines from the stage version about various ways the other fucked up in trying to help connor, but the version of them that are in the movie don't seem like they'd ever do that. if larry in this movie actively opted in to being connor's father and tried so hard to connect with him, why would he call him an attention seeker when he first attempted suicide?
-> they also cut what I always felt was a really important zoe moment here, the part where she tells larry that he kept punishing connor and treating him like a criminal but that cynthia's completely hands off approach wasn't any better.
-> the song itself was fine. you don't need me to tell you that ben platt can emote and has a good singing voice.
-> but, the last part of the song is where we find out how evan really broke his arm, and again, it is a Choice to show a flashback to a suicide attempt happening in a show that usually takes such great care in how it words everything and monitors its social media spaces to avoid putting people at risk.
-> they also have a quick scene at school the next day where evan tells zoe that he thinks her family should tell everyone what he did to get the heat off of them, and zoe says her mother doesn't want to do that and inflict that same hate mob they just got onto him, but we're meant to get the idea that that's not right, that in order for evan to truly right his wrongs, he has willingly expose himself to that mob, which I think is entirely the wrong idea.
-> "so big/so small" just doesn't hit as hard. without evan and heidi's relationship having been as fraught before, it feels like less of a release, and the fact that there's at least a day between evan confessing to the murphys and going to her makes it feel less urgent. they also cut a few lines that I personally just really liked, "heidi: I didn't know that you, that you were hurting like that... how did I not know? / evan: because I never told you / heidi: you shouldn't have had to."
-> deep sigh. the whole public confession and "accountability" thing. I really, really feel like this whole part was just trying to appease all that bad faith criticism of the show that was like "it is SO fucked up that this story literally CONDONES all of evan's actions, as evident by the fact that he isn't publicly shamed for the rest of his life and then arrested." besties, if he publicly confessed to all these lies, why wasn't he then sued for $100k dollars worth of fraud? why is "redemption" only possible by accepting that you need to be punished by the masses? they really show how the harassment affected the murphys, but evan only seems to get dirty looks in the cafeteria, there's no interaction with what this could actually do to him, it's just taken as read that this is the right thing. the people that evan really hurt were the people directly in his life, if the movie wanted him to do more to fix that then he should have done something directly for the murphys, alana, and jared, except jared doesn't have anything to really feel wronged about in this movie I guess.
-> I have mixed feelings on finding a video of connor playing a song he wrote, but I'm not that riled up about it. I do think a point of the musical is that at the end everyone has to accept that connor didn't get the help and attention he needed, he died, and that nothing can bring him back and let them know him better and they just have to move on, but this wasn't nearly as bad as it could have been. when the bar is at "at least he wasn't a ghost who narrated half the show and did actually have a real secret best friend the whole time," I think this is basically fine.
-> despite how much they made the lie spinning out like it did a problem of circumstance and not evan's decisions, they still really want the audience to know how really sorry evan is about what he did. "what I did... it's the worst thing a person can do" bestie you know that isn't true, there are innumerable worse things you can do to people. get back to me when it's time to reveal you actually killed connor and planned all of this from the start or something.
the overarching thing that I think made the movie weaker was an unwillingness to ever have anyone do anything that was actually bad. evan didn't want to lie in the first place, jared is just a funny little guy with no meanness in him, alana isn't at all trying to personally gain from connor's death, there's no evidence that zoe comes to see her brother in a different light by the end, larry and cynthia were normal and good parents, and heidi's kind of annoying sometimes but there's never any point where you can see her emotions are getting the better of her.
the things that make dear evan hansen really interesting to me is how, in one way or another, I've met all of these people before. people who have flaws and desires and unmet needs and internal lives that lead them to do bad things that seem entirely justifiable and never want to admit they're wrong. the dear evan hansen in this movie is not that, it's a story of people who never knowingly do anything wrong but are immensely guilty about it anyway, which for me makes it so much more annoying and so much less compelling to watch.
also bold move to make larry the hottest character but I'll take it.
i blame 80s movies for raising my expectations of my teenage years. like youre telling me i wont have a group of morally ambiguous and secretly depressed friends who rebel against school to do wild shit on a friday? whack
- Todd’s never been good with women; though it is partially through lack of trying. He’s never had the courage to approach a girl nor the ability to do so; considering his constant enrollment in all boys boarding schools. His whole life has sort of been a recipe for romantic disaster.
- And his general social life isn’t much better. He’s also never been good at making friends.
- But this year, that’s all changed. He’s got a friend group and he’s happy as can be …but there is something that’s wrong. Something that nags at him and keeps him up at night. You.
- You: the sweetest girl he’s ever met. The funniest, the most polite, the smartest, kindest, most interesting girl he’s ever had the pleasure of knowing. A girl so pretty that it almost hurts. …A girl who’s dating his best friend.
- If it were anyone else, anyone at all, he could maybe justify what he felt. He could reason that you deserved better, that he could treat you better …but he can’t.
- Because it’s Neil. Perfect, kind, confident Neil. He’s amazing, and you deserve that. You deserve each other and the wonderful, picture perfect relationship that the two of you share.
- It’s really almost laughable, because of course Neil has someone perfect like you and of course the one girl who pays him any attention is the one who is completely off limits.
- It all started when you first met, you’d greeted the rest of the poets with familiarity and Neil had introduced the two of you without a second thought. While all of you were walking, you’d hung back and spoken to him, patiently putting up with his awkward shyness and still being willing to talk to him every time you saw him.
- Initially, he assumed it was just because you were a girl and because you were a perfectly likeable individual that he looked forward to seeing you and got butterflies in his stomach when you spoke. But then he realized that that wasn’t it. …Dear god …he was falling in love with you.
- He watches you with Neil and he see’s how happy the two of you are together and that look of love in your eyes when you look at him and he wishes that you could look at him like that. He yearns to have that kind of love and most of all, he yearns to have it with you.
- He loves his friend, he really does, which is why he feels so guilty when he see’s the two of you acting so cute with each other and all he can do is wish that your relationship would burn out.
- Sometimes you’ll catch each others eye when you’re out and about and he’ll swear that he can see a twinkle in your eyes: a knowing, longing shine. But then you look away and he’s left feeling empty.
- Other times, he’ll catch you alone for a split second and you’ll talk until Neil inevitably arrives. And he almost gets nervous when he see’s the boy, acting just as awkward as he did when they first met, and all he can do is imagine that he’s the one walking with you under his arm.
- The worst part is that the two of you do have a connection. You get along great and you have about a dozen things in common; and he can actually talk to you. You know him and he knows that you must like him in some regard. It would be easy for him to ask you out. But he can’t.
- All he can do is imagine it. Picture what you’d do together. Picture dates and kisses and all those little quirks and habits that you have.
- And sometimes, he can hardly look you in your eyes, feeling the way he does about you, knowing that he curses his friends name and pictures you in his bed with him.
- Oh the poetry he has and could write about you, skillfully hidden away and full of different ambiguous nick names that keep anyone who stumbles across it from figuring out his secret. He wishes he could show you, see your reactions. But if he were to tell you, to show you, he doubts it would make any difference.
- Truth is like a blanket that always leaves your feet cold. And the truth is that you will never be his.
pixelskylines
titsay
romaincrisis
yousharknotpass
