Look Into My Eyes
For the last many years, Sundance Film Festival has given a platform for documentaries that have gone on to become some of the most successful in history. This year’s nonfiction slate was especially strong; it wasn’t just hagiographic bio docs about figures like Christopher Reeve, Luther Vandross and Frida Kahlo, but a number of works that elude traditional categorization altogether. The three docs in this dispatch, all more than worth your time, feel like discrete objects, projects built around their subjects in a way that fuses form and content.
The form in “Will & Harper” is basically road buddy comedy. Directed by Josh Greenbaum (“Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar”), this is the deeply personal story of Will Ferrell and his dear friend Harper Steele. Steele was a writer on “Saturday Night Live” when they met she helped Ferrell hone the comic persona that would make him famous and they’ve been close pals ever since. But he got an email a couple years ago saying that she was transitioning to become Harper something she’d wanted to do for decades, but kept secret from everyone in her life.
To see what this means and how it might change her cross country road trips through the heartland which she’d always loved taking Will decides to spend 16 days on the road with Harper. They go to a Pacers game, a stock car race, a dive bar, they hang out eating Pringles in parking lots next to her Jeep while drinking Natty Light. A few famous faces swing through (Molly Shannon stops by, Will Forte does too), but mostly it’s just them two through the windshield. They ask each other hard questions, and Ferrell wisely cedes most of the interview time with his friend (and former employee), really trying to help her figure out who she is now, how comfortable she feels about it and how the world will see her.
Greenbaum is very aware that Harper won’t exactly be treated like any other trans person just by virtue of being with Ricky Bobby. He even puts Ferrell in a disguise at one point, or tries to send Harper into an Oklahoma bar first. The vibe changes when the celebrity walks in, to say the least. But when “Will & Harper” gets around to reaching for what it means to be trans in dive bars in the South, it feels insufficient.
Thankfully not as often as it might have been in a lesser film that sets out to “solve transphobia,” but this one is really about friendship, and it’s incredibly moving on that level. Harper Steele is very brave, sharing her journal entries and speaking about the pits of despair she was in regarding her gender identity; she’s open in ways we can only sometimes be with our friends, and so it’s powerful just to see how invested Ferrell is in what Harper thinks and feels. It’s those unmanufactured conversational beats where the film finds its strength where we find strength in each other. There is a pure, true companionship here that should remind us all to call that person we know who might need someone to talk to. Sometimes even people we think we know best just need somebody to listen to them, laugh with them and eat Pringles with them.
Lana Wilson (“Miss Americana,” “Pretty Baby Brooke Shields”) returned to Sundance this year with “Look into My Eyes,” which was surprisingly effective. I say surprisingly because I’m pretty skeptical about people who claim psychic abilities, but I found the places Wilson goes here remarkably resonant. This is a movie you enter asking “Is this real?” before realizing the more important question is “Does it matter?” Wilson reframes psychic readings as acts of joint therapy, revealing how these intimate sessions are often emotionally powerful for the psychic as they are for the client some of whom may be grieving loved ones or wrestling with their own mortality while sitting across from her at a kitchen table late at night. And although Wilson avoids some of the dicey issues like profiting off grief, there’s no denying these people are finding closure and managing pain through these readings, why are they inherently deemed lesser than therapeutic or pharmaceutical industries that profit off misery? She doesn’t need you to believe, but she will make you understand.
Wilson follows seven NYC psychics through their lives, intercutting sessions with personal details about each one. They all have interesting stories most of them are adjacent to theater or acting, which should give the skeptics some fuel (she even asks one bluntly how different what she does is from stage improvisation, the answer is not much, but isn’t great improv sort of feeding off the energy of a partner too?) and it’s truly fascinating how many of them struggle with tragic loss of their own, it’s as if their efforts to contact the other side and prove that the dead can find peace there are also attempts to manage their own grief. If they can contact a client’s loved one who has found comfort in the afterlife, then that means theirs has too.
I think that what these people do are pure imagination (sorry, pet psychic), but I realized how little it matters. “Look into My Eyes” is home to three of the best scenes of Sundance this year one involves an ER nurse haunted by a child she couldn’t save, one involves a young Black man obsessed with his ancestor’s slavery and one involves an actress who hasn’t been able to perform since a friend died by suicide. In each case, they walk out undeniably changed. They find something that friends, family, therapists and probably drugs couldn’t give them, a peace that helps them move on. Isn’t that what we all want?
Lastly, there’s the harrowing “War Game,” from the great Jesse Moss (also here with “Girls State”) and Tony Gerber. The filmmakers attended a role-play event in D.C. on January 6th 2023. No, that date is not coincidental. A non-partisan group of politicians, defense analysts, intelligence officers, veterans and experts got together to play out what could happen on January 6th 2025 with an emphasis on the increasing evidence that there are members of our military who could go rogue and stand in the way of a peaceful transfer of power. It’s consistently interesting but at times feels a bit shallow as it mostly focuses on what would happen if a re-elected President was pressured into using the Insurrection Act. (Spoiler: It would be real bad.)
“War Game” works as a conversation starter too. While it tries (maybe too) hard not to be explicitly political it has to be based on what happened in 2021 and might happen in 2025. And I found its most interesting aspect the section in which the team basically fell behind in the information game allowing the “enemies” in this case a religious order who believes the current administration is illegitimate to essentially control the social game. The truth is that this is happening constantly in the real world as certain factions of the political spectrum use misinformation and those in power don’t often push back enough. The idea that agents could actively skew what could happen on January 6th, 2025 in the public eye and Biden and his team would be too busy talking about what to do next while they lost more and more support is one I hope this administration strongly considers.
Without spoiling anything, “War Game” ultimately feels a bit too optimistic, believe it or not. The role play itself is relatively tame, relying on the concept that the rogue factions of the military wouldn’t get extremely violent until the Insurrection Act was evoked. I realize it’s a different role playing game but the massive caches of weapons in this country that could be employed by those attempting a coup feel unconsidered in favor of a thought exercise more than the very physical one that could unfold that day.
That said, these are flaws of the game, not the movie, which is tightly edited to put you in that place at that time, watching as democracy teeters. The reality is that anyone who engages in such an endeavor as this does so with a built-in optimism that comes from spending your day trying to prepare for catastrophe. And I’m glad this project exists to remind us of that these men and women, many still in positions of authority; they’re out there; they want to help, I just worry about those who don’t.
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