Will & Harper
Saturday Night Live’s writer, who recently transitioned, decided to go on a road trip with his friend Will Ferrell to observe how transgender people are treated across America. Sounds familiar? Perhaps not, as you have not seen it. But this is a good story. It is no humorous prank, however. It is in the form of a documentary “Will and Harper”, which is now on Netflix.
Perhaps the creators of the film wouldn’t want to describe it like that but this is a film which is clearly designed to educate the masses in a country where one third of the population has extreme antivax sentiments towards the trans and the people who trust the media are inciting them. Wisely done in a low-key manner, this is achievable because of the chemistry between the two proponents of the title. And it acts like the kind of buddy comedy that Ferrell would’ve once starred in and probably had a press conference where he explained how bad the film was afterwards. I suppose most people do not associate buddy comedies with former SNL sketches’ cast members as particularly subtle explorations of nuances.
Harper is Harper Steele, and her former name was Andrew Steele. She was a fan of Ferrell while he was still an understudy at “Saturday Night Live” and hailed him as a talented and skilled comedian at a time when everyone else thought ‘the’ was the most interesting word in the script. All of which made for great friendship in the making. Steele wrote to Ferrell during the pandemic saying, “I received a lot of lipstick and makeup as gifts over the years and have grown older, so it comes as no surprise that I now wish to wear such things.” Likewise, Davis claimed it was a defining moment when he discovered that she was not only interested in portraying a female, but quite pleased with making the change in order to do so. Ferrell understood very well that “Andrew Steele is a maverick a man who likes icy cold beer, jeans, and thumbing for rides. He may sound eccentric, but it is loveable and eccentricity along with creativity pervades his thought process”. However, the aforementioned movie corrects Ferrel without raising a finger: it says that Davis is one of those unusual transitionists.
We would like to say that director Josh Greenbaum (‘Barb And Star Go to Vista Del Mar’) has well tilted the scales of interest more towards Harper Steele than Will Ferrell. This is hardly a tale about a white straight cisgender person who tries to come to terms with his old friend who in his eyes looks different now. It makes Ferrell out to be someone who has been empathetic and accepting of the changes long ago and now only seems to be going through the motions for the purpose of the film. He stated, “I wondered, “How long did she feel this way? What made her keep this in for so long?” And in the first days after the news, it was said that their relationship was in “uncharted waters”, but this, in some context, feels somewhat like a form of exaggerated marketing for drama’s sake. There is a very high chance that many of us already begin to expect that this too told story has been unwrapped. There is no other way people could have filmed what has already been filmed. They were afraid Ferrell would say Steele was his niece at one point, let alone say no to her or most of the hurdles in the way.
Steele’s issues are a lot more serious. In fact, they can almost qualify as issues of life or death. Steele is from Iowa and she says: “I love the United States but I just don’t know if it loves me back right now.” She has changed how she interacts with the world but still has an attachment to the same things and places, which, in her own words, include: “shitty bars,” “truck stops” and remote areas of the country where one could simply vanish and be buried without anyone knowing.
This concern is vividly illustrated by the two at the outset of the conversation about wanting to take the road trip. The most prominent issue is expressed in terms of security. Not so much about the security of these two people within the logic of a road movie of sorts they are in the company of a camera crew, one of them is Will Ferrell, and clearly, the production had permission and probably had ‘we are filming a movie and you consent to being in it if you walk into this place’ style notices erected wherever this place happens to be, the arena of the Indiana Pacers or any other of the seedy bars mentioned above. Steele gets called the wrong gender, and there is an awkward moment at the game, with the Governor of Indiana, who is all cordiality at the beginning but later reveals himself to be a staunch anti trans individual who had endorsed the ban on teenagers receiving gender-affirming care.
No, the problem is more what goes on all over the United States and in many other countries when the protagonists are not stars and do not have many cameras around them all the time to film a new Netflix movie. “Walking past all those bros in a bro-ey environment has been the hardest part of my transition,” Steele admits. But in the end, it all comes out well. And that was the objective of the exercise to explain how none of this is as big a deal as bigots make it out to be. If Will Ferrell can be 100 percent supportive of his friend Harper why can this story not be repeated all over?
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