Movie Review

Will Ferrell takes a road trip in new Netflix docu Will & Harper

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.

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

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Movie Review

Meta-comedy remake Anaconda coils itself into an unfunny mess

Photo by Matt Grace

Jack Black and Paul Rudd in Anaconda.

In Hollywood’s never-ending quest to take advantage of existing intellectual property, seemingly no older movie is off limits, even if the original was not well-regarded. That’s certainly the case with 1997’s Anaconda, which is best known for being a lesser entry on the filmography of Ice Cube and Jennifer Lopez, as well as some horrendous accent work by Jon Voight.

The idea behind the new meta-sequel Anaconda is arguably a good one. Four friends — Doug (Jack Black), Griff (Paul Rudd), Claire (Thandiwe Newton), and Kenny (Steve Zahn) — who made homemade movies when they were teenagers decide to remake Anaconda on a shoestring budget. Egged on by Griff, an actor who can’t catch a break, the four of them pull together enough money to fly down to Brazil, hire a boat, and film a script written by Doug.

Naturally, almost nothing goes as planned in the Amazon, including losing their trained snake and running headlong into a criminal enterprise. Soon enough, everything else takes second place to the presence of a giant anaconda that is stalking them and anyone else who crosses its path.

Written and directed by Tom Gormican, with help from co-writer Kevin Etten, the film is designed to be an outrageous comedy peppered with laugh-out-loud moments that cover up the fact that there’s really no story. That would be all well and good … if anything the film had to offer was truly funny. Only a few scenes elicit any honest laughter, and so instead the audience is fed half-baked jokes, a story with no focus, and actors who ham it up to get any kind of reaction.

The biggest problem is that the meta-ness of the film goes too far. None of the core four characters possess any interesting traits, and their blandness is transferred over to the actors playing them. And so even as they face some harrowing situations or ones that could be funny, it’s difficult to care about anything they do since the filmmakers never make the basic effort of making the audience care about them.

It’s weird to say in a movie called Anaconda, but it becomes much too focused on the snake in the second half of the film. If the goal is to be a straight-up comedy, then everything up to and including the snake attacks should be serving that objective. But most of the time the attacks are either random or moments when the characters are already scared, and so any humor that could be mined all but disappears.

Black and Rudd are comedy all-stars who can typically be counted on to elevate even subpar material. That’s not the case here, as each only scores on a few occasions, with Black’s physicality being the funniest thing in the movie. Newton is not a good fit with this type of movie, and she isn’t done any favors by some seriously bad wigs. Zahn used to be the go-to guy for funny sidekicks, but he brings little to the table in this role.

Any attempt at rebooting/remaking an old piece of IP should make a concerted effort to differentiate itself from the original, and in that way, the new Anaconda succeeds. Unfortunately, that’s its only success, as the filmmakers can never find the right balance to turn it into the bawdy comedy they seemed to want.

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Anaconda is now playing in theaters.

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