“Will & Harper” Is a Charming Tale of Self-Discovery, and if You Think I’d Say Anything Different, You’re Out of Your Fucking Mind

By I Might Be Wrong's new Assistant Junior Film Critic

“Will & Harper” is streaming now on Netflix.

“Alex Galanis” photo by Qi Wu.

Will & Harper — now streaming on Netflix — is about journeys. When Will Ferrell heard from an old friend, Harper Steele, who transitioned from male to female in her early 60s, the pair embarked on a cross-country trip to see what had changed and what remained the same. Steele doesn’t possess the glass-half-full optimism that seems to be in Ferrell’s DNA, and her unsuredness about what lies ahead propels this road trip movie to its destination. Of course — as another SNL cutup once said — getting there is half the fun, and Will & Harper is a delightful tale about long journeys that take us to places that we didn’t know we were headed.

Of course, if I didn’t feel that way about Will & Harper, there’s no fucking way I’d say so out loud. I mean…are you out of your fucking skull? Do you think that I, a film critic in the year 2024, would review a movie about transgender issues and say “nah, sucks”? Since I don’t wish to see my career get chainsawed in half like a skinny-dipping teen in a ‘70s slasher flick, there is no universe in which I would write anything negative about Will & Harper. Lucky for me, Will & Harper actually is “a charming tale of self-discovery.” Though, to be clear: If I didn’t feel that way, I’d banish that thought to the most unreachable part of my brain, and then write a review saying that Will & Harper is a charming tale of self-discovery.

Will and Harper’s journey starts in New York, both literally and metaphorically. They met at Saturday Night Live, where Harper — then known as Andrew — was a writer with Midwestern sensibilities and a taste for dive bars and cheap beer. In the film, Harper suggests that her rough-and-tumble persona might have been at least partly a cover for feelings of gender confusion that she says were with her from childhood. This is just one of many moments of candidness from Harper that fuels the journey captured by the film. After all: Few people are transgender, but Harper’s unpretentious candor gives insight about what it’s like to travel that road.

Then again, if Harper didn’t come across as likable, you wouldn’t be able to drag that opinion out of me with a team of wild horses. Can you imagine what would happen if I wrote “this movie features a real-life trans person, and that person kind of sucks”? I might as well walk into a biker bar and start spitting in people’s faces, or fuck a mafia don’s wife and send him pictures. If I did that, my film critic career would suffer a swifter death than if I filed a 2,000-word article comprised entirely of the n-word. They say that nothing in the universe travels faster than light, but I’d argue that new concepts of physics would be needed to measure the speed with which my career would be shit-canned if I did anything other than write glowing things about both Harper and the film.

But the movie is actually good! Would I say that if it wasn’t? Yes, one thousand percent. But it is good! But, again, I would write every word of this — including the adamant declarations that I really did enjoy the movie — even if it was all bullshit. But it’s not! (for all you know.) Will & Harper is an enjoyable and life-affirming celebration of difference. Is a sentence that I wrote before I even watched the movie. Because there is no conceivable universe in which I would say otherwise. If the film had been Will and Harper doing belly flops into an Olympic-sized pool of hippopotamus shit for two hours, I still would have called it “an enjoyable and life-affirming celebration of difference.” Because I need a paycheck, not a fucking MSNBC fatwa on my head.

The film has a 99 percent fresh score on Rotten Tomatoes, and in my opinion — which happens to be identical to the opinion I would express even if I felt the opposite way — that score is well-deserved. If you’re wondering who was the lone death-wish-having critic to brazenly post his negative review like Martin Luther nailing his Ninety-five Theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg, it’s an independent film critic who thought that the movie didn’t go far enough in drawing attention to anti-trans bias. Another 101 critics gave the film positive reviews, and they still have careers. And so do I. But I honestly did like the film, and I would have given it a positive review even if there wasn’t a sword of Damocles hanging over my head. And maybe that’s also true for 101 other critics, in which case Will & Harper truly does deserve to have reviews that are equal to or better than every single movie that ever won an Oscar for Best Picture.

Will & Harper is about being true to your feelings. It asks uncomfortable questions, like “how long can a feeling go unexpressed?” and “what are the consequences of burying an ‘unthinkable’ thought?” I hope the answers to those questions are “forever” and “nothing too serious”, because it’s statistically inevitable that I’ll eventually dislike an “important” movie, and when that day comes, I’ll banish that thought to the hinterlands of my consciousness and write a review that calls the movie “transcendent”. But Will & Harper pushed that inevitability to a future date by actually being a warm-hearted, frequently funny journey through off-the-beaten-path locations that are fun to inhabit. For that, I give it my highest rating: Five bullets dodged out of five.

***Hey! You may have noticed that for the last few “guest post” columns, I’ve left myself as the official author and put a “byline” for the columnist at the top of the article. That’s because: 1) I had to create fake e-mail addresses and Substack accounts for each columnist, and I’m bumping into the limits of how many of those I can make, and 2) The e-mails show up in your inbox under the columnist’s name (e.g. Zephyr Van Zilj, my fake unpaid intern), and people told me that those e-mails look like spam. FWIW, I already have fake accounts for repeat columnists like Paula Fox and Jacob Fuzetti, and I think that long-time readers recognize those names, so this change is really for new columnists. Anyway, here’s a poll about how I should handle guest columns in the future:

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