Somewhere out there is an uglier, maybe more easily saleable documentary about a man who, deep into middle age, is appalled to discover that an old pal has transitioned from male to female. You can imagine how that road trip would go. They bicker their way to either an understanding or a total dissolution. Isn’t all drama about conflict (or something)?
This is very much not that film. Will & Harper concerns itself with the relationship between Will Ferrell, who seems as lovely as you’d expect, and his friend Harper Steele. They have known each other since Steele, then identifying as male, was devising sketches for Ferrell on Saturday Night Live, in the 1990s, but, in the aftermath of the writer’s transition, the two have had little chance to hang out. What better way to explore the new Harper than a drive from New York City to Los Angeles?
It would be understating Ferrell’s tolerance to suggest that Steele is inviting her pal to push at an open door. No pushing is required. From the opening minutes the comic makes it clear that, in language and attitude, he will take the lead from his chortling companion. The film-makers don’t overstress what would, in a fiction film, be the comic conceit, but it fast becomes clear that Steele favours more stereotypically male pleasures – beer, sport, rough bars – than does Ferrell. As the documentary progresses, however, a suggestion develops that, as far as the sport goes anyway, she may have been overcompensating for inclinations not then fully recognised.
Will & Harper, a natural Netflix entertainment, oscillates between sincere openness and painful artifice. Nobody is here expecting rigorous fly-on-the-wall verite, but the sequence in which Will abandons Harper as, eager to make her own way as a woman, she enters a rugged, Biden-hating bar is undermined by the camera and crew following her in. Far better for them to stay with Ferrell outside and later join the socially successful trans woman.
No matter. The documentary still works as a feel-good odyssey – salted with outbreaks of online prejudice – through a country of familiar contrasts. You could, perhaps, see it as the anti-Top Gear special (or whatever the Clarkson lads’ thing was called on Prime Video). Nicer, warmer, militantly tolerant.
Will & Harper is in selected cinemas from Friday, September 27th
