Manufactured for Hollywood
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Texans to Hollywood: "Don't dangle your dingle in our faces and demand we call it a vagina"
Will Ferrell regrets awkward Texas restaurant visit after co-star booed for trans rights toast
It happened while Ferrell and Steele, a former "Saturday Night Live" head writer, were filming their new Netflix documentary, "Will & Harper," which follows their 17-day road trip across the country "to bond and reintroduce Harper to the country as her true self" after Steele came out as transgender in 2022.
They received what they described as an unexpected and uncomfortable response from diners at a Texas restaurant after Steele mentioned the state hadn't done enough for trans rights, the New York Times reported.
"I'm from Iowa, but I will raise a glass to your great state of Texas," Steele said to a receptive audience of diners at the Big Texan Steak Ranch in Amarillo, where Ferrell and Steele planned to attempt the restaurant's famous 72-ounce steak challenge.
"I wish you guys would do more for trans rights in this state," Steele added, which silenced the cheers and was met with a few groans from the audience, Chron reported.
"Cheers to Texas and trans rights, right?" Ferrell added. The toast didn't make it into the documentary, but Steele and Ferrell shared their responses to the moment afterward.
That’s worth repeating: “The toast didn't make it into the documentary, but Steele and Ferrell ‘shared’ (how nice) their responses to the moment afterward. Pro Tip: If you want to make a film that “proves” Golden Retrievers are a vicious breed, poke one repeatedly with sharp sticks off-camera, then film its reaction.
"The room started to feel very wrong to me," Steele said in the film. "I was feeling a little like my transness was on display, I guess, and suddenly that sort of made me feel not great."
So, they set out to make a film about friendship, how one male accepts his long-time friend’s decision to put on a dress and say “call me Shirley”. Fine; I’d hope I could be as accepting and tolerant if one of my own friends went that route (looking at you, Mick). But it’s obvious that the producers felt a need to introduce an element of oppression and intolerance into what otherwise is the standard Hollywood trope, a story of “boy meets (sort of a) girl. So they go to Texas to enter a steak-eating contest, but, instead of just doing that and waving to the audience, Miss Steele, with cameras rolling, stands up in front of crowd and deliberately provokes a reaction (“silence, mixed with a few groans”) that the director can include in the film (after deleting Steele’s toast and Ferrell’s own comments that prompted that reaction) and impress his fellow Hollywood swamp denizens and media sycophants. And, of course, it worked:
Time Magazine, aping the NYT, was “appalled and shocked”
[T]heir cross-country adventure between New York and L.A. (with stops that included Iowa, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Texas) eventually became the Josh Greenbaum-directed documentary Will & Harper, a nostalgic, heartfelt, and witty road movie, and one of the most beautiful films about friendship ever made. The film by Greenbaum (best known for the 2021 comedy Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar) organically captures the duo’s vibe, charged by similar temperaments and a sense of humor fully in sync ever since they met at Saturday Night Live in 1995.
The trip wasn’t always smooth sailing. Amid all the pleasant encounters and family visits, there was an experience at a steakhouse in Amarillo, Tex., where they were met with hostility. The transphobic social media attacks that came after, also included in the film, were equally painful. As Ferrell puts it, one of the themes of the movie is whether the country that Harper loves so much loves her back. The answer that the Amarillo experience offers is a distressing one.
And the critics ate it up
Critical response
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 99% of 90 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 7.9/10. The website's consensus reads: "Endearing and heartfelt, Will & Harper is an ode and testament to long-lasting love, acceptance and evolution within a friendship."[9] Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 75 out of 100, based on 22 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.[10]
The New York Times critic Manohla Dargis called the film, "A Transcendent Road Trip," and summarized that, "A documentary about Will Ferrell and his friend Harper Steele brought the house down" at the Sundance Film Festival.[11] At Collider, Taylor Gates rated this an 8 out of 10 and characterized it as a "must-watch", praising the principals' openness and the mixture of educational and entertainment elements, but critiquing the pacing.[12] The Daily Beast's Kevin Fallon opined that this film will save lives for being "brave and characteristically unusual".[13] Benjamin Lee of The Guardian rated this film 3 out of 5 stars, writing that "there are enough earned moments of piercing sadness and shaggy humour that those that feel more engineered can distract, the film trying to force itself into the structure of something it doesn’t need to be, pushing us away just after we’ve been pulled in close".[14] Lovia Gyarkye of The Hollywood Reporter stated that the film "works because, at its core, the doc is a tribute to Ferrell and Steele’s evolving friendship" and that the pair's "level of honesty keeps the conversations grounded and helps the documentary avoid turning Steele into a prop for Ferrell’s education".[15] Lauren Wissot of IndieWire graded this work a B−, stating that the narrative is "admirable and understandable" but "trapped in a mushy middle state, forever prevented from rising to the level of either great drama or great comedy".[16]
In a capsule review out of Sundance, Brian Tallerico of RogerEbert.com praised Greenbaum's direction and continued that the film shows "a pure, true companionship here that should serve as a reminder to call that person in your life who might need someone to talk to".[17] In Rolling Stone David Fear called Will & Harper "a portrait of a friendship and how the fundamentals of a deep and lasting bond doesn’t change even when the people within it do" that is "flawed" but "priceless".[18] Writing for United Press International, Fred Topel ended his review calling this "a touching journey with two friends sharing laughs that can help start more conversations amongst people Steele and Ferrell will never meet".[19] Peter Debruge of Variety wrote that "It can sound like a cliché to say that any given movie is what the world needs now, but Will & Harper earns that distinction. Struggling to recognize her own beauty in a society that often seems determined to deny her identity altogether, Steele brings the trans experience down to earth. Meanwhile, by accepting his fledgling gal pal on her own terms—and asking how to make her more comfortable in her own skin—Ferrell sets the best kind of example. We should all be so lucky as to have friends like these."[20] Bilge Ebiri of Vulture ended his review: "The film’s familiarity may well be part of its design. It clearly wants to help change hearts and minds, and find purchase with audiences that would otherwise avoid a movie with a subject like this."
Humbug.
