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‘Evan Hansen’ is better than you think – and that’s too bad

Platt’s artificiality, film’s tokenism hard to get past

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Ben Platt and Kaitlyn Dever in ‘Dear Evan Hansen.’ (Photo courtesy Universal Pictures)

It’s always a let down when a movie doesn’t live up to your expectations.

Take, for example, “Dear Evan Hansen,” Steven Chbosky’s new film version of the Tony-winning Broadway musical that made stars of its lead actor (Ben Platt) and songwriters (Benj Pasek and Justin Paul). Based on the less-than-favorable buzz – especially around the choice to let Platt reprise a role for which he was now a decade too old – that dominated online conversation around it in the weeks before its release, I walked into the theater fully expecting to see an appallingly terrible movie.

To my deep disappointment, it was not. Don’t get me wrong – it wasn’t a great one, either. It just wasn’t the so-bad-it’s-good disaster I was looking forward to hating.

If you’re unfamiliar, “Evan Hansen” is the tale of a teenager (Platt) returning to school for his senior year after a traumatic summer experience. Struggling with severe social anxiety, he lives with a divorced mother (Julianne Moore) who works extra shifts to make ends meet. Assigned by his therapist to write himself encouraging letters every day, his life turns upside down when a classmate named Connor (Colton Ryan) intercepts one such letter and takes it from him. When Connor takes his own life a few days later, his parents (Amy Adams, Danny Pino) find the letter in his pocket and mistakenly think it was written by their son to a secret friend; they reach out to Evan, hoping to hear stories about a happier Connor than the angry loner they knew at home. Though he tries at first to correct their misunderstanding, his desire to ease their grief soon has him inventing a friendship that never existed. It’s a well-intentioned lie that soon snowballs on the internet, making Evan a viral sensation and putting him at the center of an online awareness-raising movement called The Connor Project – not to mention gaining him the attention of Connor’s sister Zoe (Kaitlyn Dever), who has been his longtime crush from afar. When things inevitably begin to spiral out of his control, he is forced to recognize that building a new life for himself on a falsehood might have consequences he never had in mind – but can he muster the courage to come clean and expose himself to the world as a fraud before it’s too late to reverse the damage he’s already done?

The stage original was a hit on Broadway in 2015, but despite its popularity and accolades, it was not without its detractors. Critics and audiences alike found numerous reasons to be uncomfortable with its premise – not the least of which involved the questionable ethics at its core. The movie, which was adapted by Steven Levenson from his original book for the show, corrects for some of those criticisms, boosting the story’s diversity with a few minor character revisions and expanding the ending to allow a more complete redemption arc for its leading character. It also doubles down on the show’s youth appeal by building up some of the original content around the show’s younger characters – including a substantially expanded role for Evan’s overachieving schoolmate Alana (Amandla Stenberg) – and cutting some from around the adults. For the most part, these changes strengthen and deepen the narrative; likewise, the very nature of the cinematic medium gives it an obvious advantage in exploring the story’s underlying concern with the power of the internet over our cultural and social lives. 

Yet despite these improvements, “Evan Hansen” on film still falls short of being excellent. It’s not because of weak direction; Chbosky has a gift for conveying the complex and conflicting emotions of teenage experience with nuance and insight, something that goes a long way toward keeping “Evan Hansen” from becoming trite. Nor is it the cast; the film’s talented ensemble of players is more than up to the challenge of jumping from realistic scene work into the full conceit of a musical number and finding just the right balance to make it work. In particular, the always-luminous Moore is pitch-perfect as Evan’s mom, as is Adams as her grieving counterpart; and Dever is unequivocally superb as Zoe, quietly providing the heartbreaking honesty necessary to make her character’s journey come clearly and authentically to life – something absolutely needed if we are to believe in her relationship with Evan.

And that brings us to the problem: Evan himself is a hard sell. On one hand, he is grappling with mental health issues, not to mention an absent father and an overextended mother, and therefore draws our sympathies; yet on the other, he deceives and manipulates people to gain the things he is missing in his life – the attention of his classmates, a girlfriend, a substitute family – and justifies it with the belief that he is benefitting a higher cause. Platt’s performance on Broadway helped make it work through the raw power of his emotion and his prowess as a singer.

But the world has changed in the years since “Evan Hansen” landed on Broadway. During a cultural crisis born (among other things) of the ease by which “alternative facts” can disrupt our lives, it’s grown more difficult to find such a character appealing, no matter how soulfully he warbles Pasek and Paul’s heart-tugging pop-flavored showtunes. And while Platt may deliver a faithful rendering of his acclaimed stage performance, next to the elegant self-assurance of the rest of the film’s cast he seems over-the-top, a bundle of performative tics and mannerisms that distract us from the reality of Evan’s struggles and make him come off as disingenuous.

As for the controversy around his age, it should be noted that all the film’s teen characters are played by actors in their 20s, a common practice in Hollywood movies. Still, in spite of the sometimes painfully obvious efforts made to “youthen” him for the camera, Platt is nevertheless noticeably older-looking than his co-stars, something that (for obvious reasons) is particularly troubling in his scenes with Dever, who is much more convincing as a 17-year old than he.

Still, it’s not the age problem alone that keeps “Evan Hansen” from winning us over. It’s the combination of all the artificiality he brings with him – which includes our knowledge that his father, Marc C. Platt, co-produced the film. It has the counter-productive result of tainting the sincerity of everything we see on the screen, even to the point of giving the movie’s nods to diversity and inclusion an unpleasant odor of tokenism, and it ensures that we won’t be quite as eager to bestow forgiveness on the title character as the story wants us to be.

That’s why it’s a disappointment that “Dear Evan Hansen” isn’t terrible. It might have been one of the great Hollywood debacles, a monumental flop to be revered by generations of audiences who loved to make fun of it. It could have been a camp classic.

Instead, it’s just another promising project sunk by Hollywood hubris, a mediocre misfire with a few good moments that never really had the chance at being more than that, but certainly could have been so much less.

That, at least, would have made it memorable.

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Neo-noir ‘Femme’ offers sexy, intense revenge fantasy

A work of real and thrilling cinematic vision

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George MacKay and Nathan Stewart-Jarrett star in ‘Femme.’ (Photo courtesy of Utopia)

They say “revenge is sweet,” and it must be true. Why else would so many of our popular stories, dating all the way back to “Medea” and beyond, be focused on the idea of getting “even” with the people who have done us wrong?

It’s a concept with obvious appeal for anyone who has felt unjustly used by the world – or, more accurately, by the people in it – but that has particular resonance, perhaps, for modern queer audiences, long used to being relegated to the status of “victim” in the narratives we see on our screens. In “Femme” — the new UK indie thriller helmed by first-time feature directors Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choon Ping, now in limited theatrical release and expanding wider over the next two weeks — it provides the irresistible hook for a gripping tale of calculated vengeance in the face of anti-queer violence. Like the best of such stories, however, it’s as much a cautionary tale as it is a wish-fulfillment fantasy.

Set in London, it centers on Jules (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett), aka Aphrodite Banks, a popular drag performer in the city’s queer club scene who, after a performance one night, steps out in full costume to buy a pack of cigarettes and becomes the victim of a traumatic “gay bashing” incident at the hands of a young man goaded to violence by a thuggish gang of friends. Months later, though he’s recovered from his physical injuries, he is still deeply affected by the inner scars that linger. Robbed of the confidence that allowed him to perform, he’s withdrawn into a reclusive life, until concern from his friends and housemates prompts him to finally venture out into the world for a night of cruising at a gay sauna – where he encounters his bully doing the same thing. 

Unrecognizable and anonymously masculine out of his drag persona, Jules finds himself beginning a dangerous and duplicitous game in which he plans to “out” his former attacker – whose name, as he learns, is Preston (George MacKay) – in the most humiliating way possible. As his scheme begins to play out, however, he encounters an obstacle: in getting to know the closeted Preston, he is surprised to discover not only empathy for someone living their life in terrified camouflage, but a mutual attraction that develops despite the horrific history between them.

Framed as a self-described “neo-noir” story, a designation that implies a certain flavor of moral ambiguity as much as it does a tense and shadowy tale of intrigue or a psychologically complex tone, it’s a movie that relies heavily on style in order to sell its conceptual premise. Realistically, we might question the boldness that permits our protagonist to enact such a potentially hazardous scheme, but in the context of its genre trappings we are lulled into accepting it. And while most of us are likely “jaded” enough to question the possibility of tenderness between its two leading characters, the accepted conceits of the film noir form are enough to sell it to us – or at least allow us to grapple with it alongside Jules, whose righteously Machiavellian master plan is threatened by the feelings he “catches” in spite of himself.

That, of course, is part of the whole point. “Femme,” though it establishes itself by virtue of its very title as a testament to the struggle to “pass” for straight in a world that places a value judgment on perceived adherence to a strict norm for gender and sexuality, hinges on the idea that such things aren’t quite as clear-cut as we want to make them. Despite the black-and-white certainty we cling to when it comes to the subject of abusive or toxic relationships, there’s an emotional component that can only be ignored or dismissed at our peril, and even our most resolute intentions can be undermined by the shades of gray we discover in our hearts. 

Freeman and Ng – who also wrote the screenplay, adapting their own BAFTA-nominated short film from 2021 (starring Harris Dickinson and Paapa Essiedu) into a feature-length expansion – seem bent on challenging our snap judgments, on forcing us to sympathize with our oppressors by showing us the ways in which they, too, are prevented from living a fully authentic life by the expectations of their cultural environment. Even more challenging for many modern audiences, perhaps, may be the unavoidable observation that, in enacting his plan of revenge, Jules crosses the line between being a victim and being a victimizer – a fine point that may trigger uncomfortable implications in a social environment that has become marked by divisive moral constructs and hardline ethical posturing.

Before we scare you off with discussion of high-concept themes and “culture war” rhetoric, however, it’s crucial to bring up the elements that lift “Femme” above and beyond the level of so many such narrative films and makes it a somewhat unexpectedly potent piece of cinematic storytelling – and all of them have to do with the skill and intention behind it.

As to the former, the movie’s first-time directors manage a remarkable debut, steeping their film in moody, genre-appropriate visuals and murky morality. They pave a path beyond the easy assessments proscribed for us by conventional thinking, and force us to follow our sympathies into a disquieting confrontation between what we “know” as right and what we feel as true; at the same time, they push back against any natural sentimentality we might have about the situation, stressing the toxicity of the relationship in the middle of their film, the ironically-reversed insincerity of its dynamic – and, perhaps most importantly, the reality of the defining circumstances around it. While we might find ourselves longing for a happier resolution than the one we expect, the film makes no pretense that these two men might overcome the deep denial and traumatic associations – not to mention the calculated lack of honesty on the side of its de facto protagonist, to achieve some kind of “happy ending” between themselves. Nevertheless, we hope for it, in spite of ourselves.

That delicate dynamic works largely because of the movie’s lead actors. Both Stewart-Jarrett (“Candyman”) and MacKay (“Pride”, “1917”) deliver fully invested, utterly relatable performances, finding the emotional truth behind their interactions with as much palpable authenticity as they bring to the chemistry between them. They force us to abandon our preconceived ideas about each character by finding the human presence behind them, and it makes the story’s final outcome feel as heartbreaking as it does inevitable.

As for intention, “Femme” – which premiered at last year’s Berlin International Film Festival and went on to gather acclaim across the international film fest circuit – might be a little hard to take for the easily triggered, we won’t deny it. Still, it’s a work of real and thrilling cinematic vision that goes beyond easy morality to highlight the tragedy that comes from being forced to live behind a mask for the sake of societal acceptance. It’s also exciting, smart, and unexpectedly sexy – all of which make it a highly- recommended addition to your watchlist.

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Tommy Dorfman makes directorial debut in ‘I Wish You All the Best’

Film premiered at SXSW

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(Courtesy photo)

Editor’s note: Jack Morningstar attended SXSW.

Based on Mason Deaver’s novel, “I Wish You All the Best” follows Ben DeBacker (Corey Fogelmanis), a nonbinary teen who is thrown out of their house and forced to move in with their estranged older sister and her husband.

The film premiered at SXSW last week and stars Corey Fogelmanis, Miles Gutierrez-Riley, Alexandra Daddario and Cole Sprouse, Lena Dunham and was produced by Matt Kaplan and Tommy Dorfman. In addition to directing and producing, Dorfman also adapted the screenplay. 

“I had never read a book that centered on an experience that mirrored mine so vividly — just being a queer kid from the South — so I immediately was interested in adapting it and was putting myself up for that,” she said.

The heartwarming film brings awareness to the plight of LGBTQ kids who grow up in conservative families and communities, while also emphasizing that, as Dorfman noted, “safety can be found in many places.” In this case, the main protagonist, Ben, finds refuge in their friendship with Nathan. Fogelmanis, who plays Ben, explains that “together they have so many first-time experiences. Learning to let your walls down with someone that is a stranger, or that you don’t have a biological bond with is really scary. And then just to see all the stuff that comes up and have that person still accept you is just the greatest thing for Ben.”

Fogelmanis and Gutierrez-Riley were obvious choices for the roles of Ben and Nathan.

“It was really clear to me from a filmmaker perspective. There were a couple of people for each role that I was interested in and enjoyed working with, but Fogelmanis, from that first tape to the last chemistry read made it so clear who Ben was, who Ben is, and who Ben could be. Miles, who plays Nathan, is so amazing as well,” Fogelmanis added. “It was really effortless in a way. Reading Tommy’s words was super easy to find my way into.”

Dorfman found it particularly easy to work with Gutierrez-Riley as well since they attended the same acting program at Fordham University. 

“I remember when I was working with Miles in the audition process, I was like, oh, I know how to talk to you. That’s huge. It helped me as a first-time director,” she said.

Dorfman wanted to be careful “not fall into the trap of dramatizing Ben’s gender or coming out too much. It is important to remember that viewing people solely through the lens of their gender or sexuality diminishes their vast and complex humanity. For instance, my life extends beyond my trans identity. I’m an artist, a wife, a mother to two dogs, a sister to four siblings, an avid reader of classic literature, 10 years sober, have ADHD, enjoy arranging flowers and charming tableware, to name a few things.”

“Similarly, my film’s protagonist, Ben, doesn’t have an identity exclusive to being a queer teenager. Although their coming out experience is crucial and worth exploring, an obvious jumping-off point in my film, it’s what happens after they’re able to open up that inspired me to make ‘I Wish You All The Best,’ Dorfman added. “My film examines the discomfort of being seventeen, falling in love with a classmate, forming friendships, finding a voice through painting and self-expression, learning to love and be loved, navigating anxiety and depression, and coping with the pressures of growing up. These are universal and very human experiences that shape Ben beyond the limits of representation or perception.” 

Dorfman describes being one of the few openly transgender directors as “an honor and a disappointment.” She added, “I wish there were more of us, but there will be. It’s exciting, though, to be part of this next generation of creators and filmmakers entering this space and telling more human experiences.”

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Nick Kroll and Andrew Rannells want to adopt baby in ‘I Don’t Understand You’

Film premiered at SXSW in Austin

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(Courtesy photo)

Editor’s note: Jack Morningstar attended SXSW in Austin, Texas.

“I Don’t Understand You” focuses on a couple whose romantic Italian getaway devolves into bloody chaos while they prepare to adopt their first child. 

The film, while veering into hilariously gruesome hijinks, tells the story of a gay couple who is willing to kill for a chance at fatherhood. It sheds light on the hurdles that same-sex couples often go through in the adoption process: Financial burdens, time constraints, fraud, and in this case, a rural Italian family.

The film premiered last weekend at SXSW in Austin and stars Nick Kroll and Andrew Rannells along with Nunzia Schiano, Morgan Spector and Eleonora Romandini. It was written and directed by Brian Crano and David Craig, who are married. They sourced inspiration from their own adoption struggles and an Italian vacay gone wrong. 

“We were about to leave for Italy when we found out that we had matched with a birth mother and our son would be born in about six weeks,” said Crano. 

According to Craig, the trip was tense and it culminated in their car getting stuck in a ditch on their way to an anniversary dinner.

“We ended up at an old lady’s house after she rescued us in her Fiat. Her family cooked us a meal and we stayed up drinking with them until 3 a.m., not understanding a word they were saying,” he said.

Without spoiling anything, the couple in the movie go to absurd lengths to ensure that their adoption goes through. Craig explained that the theme of the movie was “what would you do for your kid.” 

“We were three years into our own journey at the time and realized we would literally do anything to make that dream a reality. It’s really a love letter to our son,” he said.

The film is hard to relegate to a single genre. 

“When conceiving the story, we saw it as different parts — romantic comedy, horror movie, murder play — but I think by bringing in Nick and Andrew that blend actually became much more of an organic mix where the comedy sustained throughout. They elevated it in a more elegant fashion,” said Craig. 

“I Don’t Understand You”was produced by Pinky Promise, a women-led production company with the mission to elevate diverse voices in their storytelling. Kara Durrett, Pinky Promise’s current president was a champion of this script from the beginning. Founder Jessamine Burgum recounts that when Durrett was onboarding, she said “If you don’t get [“I Don’t Understand You”] I don’t know if this is going to work.” 

It ultimately became one of the first projects Burgum and Durrett collaborated on. 

Kroll and Rannells’ chemistry carried the film. 

“There was a desire to work with each of them because they had both separately been in such amazing comedian teams — like Andrew with Josh Gad and Nick with John Mulaney. Nick and Andrew’s characters are in almost every scene of the movie together, so they needed to be adept to basically doing a shared performance. There was no one more well-positioned to do this as naturally as possible,” said Crano. 

Their characters are easy to root for, yet also deeply flawed. 

“A big thing we wanted to do with this movie, and with all of our work in telling stories, is avoid telling a cliched gay trauma film. We’ve never ascribed to the idea that there is a subcategory to film that is LGBTQ, rather — movies are for everyone. We want to make a movie where gay characters are flawed, not for being gay, but because of who they are. They can be villains, but they are our protagonists,” said Craig. 

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