Did you ever hear the one about the "Saturday Night Live" writer who came out as transgender to his friend Will Ferrell, and they took a road trip across the United States to see how the country reacts to transgender people? You haven't? You should, because it's pretty funny. And in the end, it's no joke. It takes the form of a documentary called "Will and Harper." It's on Netflix.
Though I suspect the folks behind it would dislike this term, the movie is pretty unabashedly a teaching tool aimed at a country where maybe a third of the electorate not only has deep animosity towards transgender people but is being fed hate rhetoric about them daily. It's affecting in its low-key way, thanks to the chemistry of its title personalities. And it works as the kind of buddy comedy Ferrell might've starred in at one time (and would probably have had to apologize for later). After all, buddy comedies with former "Saturday Night Live" cast members aren't known for their sophisticated grasp of nuance.
Harper is Harper Steele, formerly Andrew Steele. She was at "Saturday Night Live" before Ferrell got there and championed him as a gifted comedian even though nobody there thought a lot of him when he was starting out, which became the basis for a beautiful friendship. During the pandemic, Ferrell received an email from Steele that read simply, "I'm old now, and as ridiculous and unnecessary as it may seem to report, I'll be transitioning to live as a woman." Ferrell was stunned because, as he puts it, "Andrew was an Iowa-born, 501 jeans, shitty beer, hitchhiking type of guy, basically a lovable curmudgeon with a super-weird, creative sense of humor"—which, as the movie shows us (in a way that corrects Ferrell's perceptions without being strident about it) is a misperception about the sorts of people who transition.
To its credit, director Josh Greenbaum ("Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar") ultimately weights the scales of interest more towards Harper Steele than Will Ferrell. This is not so much a movie about a straight and cisgender-identifying person learning how to accept his old pal in a new package. It turns Ferrell into an audience surrogate who has traveled the road of understanding and acceptance a long time ago and is reenacting it for the cameras, in a way. Ferrell says that after receiving the email, he wondered, ""How long did she feel this way? What made her keep this in for so long?" and says that in the immediate aftermath of the news, their friendship was in "uncharted waters," but that feels like an exaggeration for storytelling's sake. It's pretty clear from the way these two interact on camera, as well as some other details, that there was never even a slight chance that Ferrell would reject Steele or even have a lot of issues to overcome.
Steele's concerns are more pressing. In fact, they are quite literally life-or-death. Steele is from Iowa and says she "loves the United States, but I just don't know if it loves me back right now." She presents herself to the world differently than before but still loves the same stuff, including, in her words, "shi--y bars" and "truck stops" and the parts of the country where a body could disappear and nobody would ever find out.
This concern becomes immediately clear as the two discuss taking a road trip. The main concern is safety. Not so much the safety of these two within the context of a real-life road movie: they're traveling with a camera crew, one of them is Will Ferrell, and presumably, the production got clearance and put signs up saying, basically, "We're making a movie, you give your permission to be in it when you go inside this establishment," whether the establishment is the arena where the Indiana Pacers play or one of the aforementioned dive bars. Steele gets misgendered, and there's an unfortunate encounter at the game with the governor of Indiana, who acts friendly but turns out to be a big anti-trans person who signed a bill denying teenagers gender-affirming care.
No, the concern is more about what is already happening across the United States and around the world when the people involved aren't famous and don't have multiple cameras on them at all times, collecting material for a Netflix documentary. "Walking past all those bros in a bro-ey environment has been the hardest part of my transition," Steele admits. It all turns out pretty well in the end, though. And, of course, that's the point of the exercise: to show that none of this is as big a deal as bigots make it out to be and that if Will Ferrell can be 100 percent supportive of his friend Harper, there's no reason why the same scenario can't repeat itself everywhere.
