Movie Review

Will & Harper docu goes on transgender road trip with Will Ferrell

Harper Steele and Will Ferrell in Will & Harper.

Photo courtesy of Netflix

As the rights and acceptance of the LGBTQ+ community have expanded over the past 50 or so years, one part of that group, transgender people, has found it more difficult to be considered a normal part of society. Every new instance of putting the story of a transgender person on screen, whether fictional or real, increases their exposure to those who might never have encountered them before.

That makes a documentary like Will & Harper (a title which seems to take inspiration from the groundbreaking TV series Will & Grace) valuable. The fact that the “Will” in the title is comedian/actor Will Ferrell helps, as he and longtime friend, Harper Steele, embark on a road trip across the United States soon after Harper reveals her transition from a man to a woman.

Harper, who met Will while they were both at Saturday Night Live in the late '90s/early 2000s, decided at the relatively older age of 59 that she could no longer pretend to be someone she wasn’t. The idea of the road trip – and of filming it – came about so that the friends could reconnect, learn more about each other given the momentous change, and do a lot of the things that Harper enjoyed doing by herself prior to her transition.

Director Josh Greenbaum and his crew attach a camera to the hood of Harper’s old Jeep Wagoneer to record her and Will's conversations as they traverse many states, starting in New York and heading west. Their connection to SNL means that many of the show’s current and former stars show up in one form or another along the way, including Tina Fey, Seth Meyers, Tim Meadows, Lorne Michaels, Molly Shannon, Kristen Wiig, and Will Forte, among others.

While their love and respect for Harper is obvious, Harper has trepidation over how strangers in middle America will react to her. The presence of Will (and the cameras) gives her perhaps easier acceptance than someone not traveling with a famous person, but there are still more than a few uncomfortable stops, particularly when they get to the South (Texas does not come off well, but surprisingly Oklahoma does).

Those scenes with everyday Americans are interesting (if occasionally a bit contrived), but the heart of the film is the friendship between Will and Harper. Their conversations range from silly to heartfelt, but there is a genuineness to them that can’t be faked. Harper invites Will to ask her any questions he has about her transition, resulting in insightful – and, often, funny – answers. Their friendship was clearly already strong, but it gets palpably stronger during the 17-day journey.

There are a lot of messages one could get from a film like this, but it’s notable for how apolitical it is. Will and Harper have encounters with Eric Holcomb, the Republican governor of Indiana, as well as a few people wearing MAGA hats, but their positions on transgender people goes unremarked upon. The friends gently correct people who mis-gender Harper, but they never express any animosity towards them. It’s a movie about exploration, with education as a side benefit.

While it might be too strong to say that Will & Harper is a world-changing film, it adds another layer to the story of transgender people as a whole. It also shows the unconditional love between two friends, a lesson that is heartening in divided times.

---

Will & Harper is now playing in select theaters; it will debut on Netflix on September 27.

movies film

Movie Review

Oscar-winning director tackles WWII in melodramatic film Blitz

Photo courtesy of Apple TV+

Elliott Heffernan and Saoirse Ronan in Blitz.

The horrors of World War II are 80+ years in the past, yet they remain a fascination for many filmmakers. The latest film to tackle the era, Blitz, is centered around the German Blitzkrieg air raids on London in September 1940, but uses a more personal story to illustrate its impact.

Rita (Saoirse Ronan) lives with her 9-year-old son George (Elliott Heffernan) and her father Gerald (Paul Weller) in the lower class neighborhood of Stepney, but no one in the city is immune from the bombs being dropped by the Germans. The government has opened up some of the Underground (aka subway) tunnels for residents to use as bomb shelters, but the haphazard nature of their availability leads Rita to send George to safety in the countryside to protect him.

George, who is biracial, experiences racist abuse on the train, and instead of remaining with the other children to their destination, he jumps off and tries to make his way back to London. Meanwhile, Rita is doing her best to keep her mind off of George’s absence, working at a munition factory and volunteering at a bomb shelter, not knowing that George has put himself back in danger.

Written and directed by Steve McQueen, the film should be one that elicits emotions relatively easily, with ordinary people dealing with the effects of war and a mother separated from her only child. And while all the elements are present, there’s that certain something missing that leaves the story somewhat uninvolving. McQueen makes you want to see George make it back safely and for Rita to be reunited with him, but there is a degree of sentimentality that’s missing from the film as a whole.

Instead of going down that road, McQueen puts a big focus on the racism and bigotry experienced by various people in the film. Flashbacks give a sense of what George and his dad, Marcus (CJ Beckford), went through prior to the war, and Ife (Benjamin Clementine), a warden who tries to help George find his way home, encounters it multiple times while just doing his duty. While McQueen’s point that people of color still had to endure acts of hatred in a time when people should have been coming together, his methods of showing it are often heavy-handed.

Still, the film is well-made and remains visually engaging throughout. The combination of practical sets and CGI put the viewer right in the middle of the bombed-out London, and there are few missteps with how the city is presented. And even though the main mother-son story is only lightly effective, the trials and tribulations that each go through individually are interesting and occasionally suspenseful.

Ronan is a fantastic actor who might get nominated for an Oscar yet again for her other recent film, The Outrun, but this role pales in comparison. Whether it’s because the 30-year-old is a bit young to be fully believable in a mother role or because of the storytelling missteps, she’s merely good instead of great here. Heffernan does a solid job in his film debut, reacting ably to McQueen putting him through his paces.

Blitz joins the seemingly never-ending well of stories from World War II, and while it doesn’t succeed as mightily as other notable war films, it never becomes anything less than watchable. The family story at its center could have been more heartfelt, but McQueen is still a great filmmaker with a flair for visual composition.

---

Blitz is now streaming on Apple TV+.

movies film