The crowd-pleasing gloss of the slickly made documentary Will & Harper, premiering to the kind of intense enthusiasm most market titles here would dream of (multiple standing ovations after; laughter, tears and applause during), is both blessing and curse. The film, which follows Will Ferrell as he goes on a road trip with an old SNL friend who has recently transitioned, is told on a grand scale, looking like a narrative studio movie and punctuated with celebrity cameos, and aims to add dimension to an experience most mainstream audiences still know very little about. It’s effective too, working as both buddy comedy and much-needed act of public service.
But sometimes the lines between fact and fiction get a little blurry, those involved with the film a little too self-aware of their wide audience, as moments of genuinely gut-wrenching poignance run up against moments of genuinely jarring artifice. The director, Josh Greenbaum, who has directed broad studio comedies before like Barb and Star Go to Vista del Mar and Strays, can sometimes over-orchestrate, laying on a score that feels too big or constructing a moment that feels too pre-planned. It’s a difficult balance, especially when your two leads work in comedy, and it’s not something the film itself doesn’t wrestle with, the very notion of an A-list movie star travelling across the US with a camera crew an unnatural thing.
