The Sundance Film Festival has been a launchpad for some of the most successful documentaries of the last several decades, and this year’s non-fiction slate was particularly robust. It wasn’t just the bio-docs about figures like Christopher Reeve, Luther Vandross, and Frida Kahlo, there was also a strong array of projects that broke out of traditional categorization. The three docs in this dispatch, all worth seeing to varying degrees, feel distinct, projects designed around their subjects in a way that marries form and content.
The form in “Will & Harper” is basically a road buddy comedy. Directed by Josh Greenbaum (“Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar”), this is the deeply personal story of Will Ferrell and his good friend Harper Steele. They met when Steele was a writer on “Saturday Night Live,” helping Ferrell hone the comedic persona that would make him a household name. They’ve been friends for three decades, but Ferrell was still startled to receive an email a couple years ago that Steele was transitioning to become Harper, something she had wanted to do for decades, but a secret she kept from everyone in her life.
To process this change and see how it would impact the road trips across this country’s heartland that Steele had loved to take her entire life, Will and Harper decide to spend 16 days on the road. They go to a Pacers game, a stock car race, a dive bar, and hang out in parking lots, eating Pringles and drinking Natty Light. A few famous faces pop up, including visits to Molly Shannon and Will Forte, but it’s mostly just Will and Harper through the windshield of her Jeep. They ask delicate questions about each other, and Ferrell smartly cedes most of the discussion to his friend, really trying to help Harper process how she sees herself and her comfort in how the world sees her now.
Greenbaum smartly foregrounds the idea that Harper won’t exactly be treated like an average trans person simply by virtue of being with Ricky Bobby. They even go as far as to try and put Ferrell in disguise, or, in one of the film’s best scenes, send Harper into an Oklahoma bar first. The mood definitely changes when the celebrity joins her. When it feels like “Will & Harper” is reaching for what it means to be trans in dive bars in the South, it feels inadequate.
Luckily, this isn’t as often as it might have been in a lesser film that set out to “solve transphobia.” This one is really about friendship, and it is remarkably moving on that level. Harper Steele is extremely brave, sharing her journal entries and speaking about pits of despair that she was in regarding her gender identity. She is open in ways that we can sometimes only be with our friends, and it’s powerful simply to see how invested Ferrell is in what Harper is thinking and feeling. It’s in those unmanufactured conversational beats that this film finds its strength, in how we can find strength in each other. There’s 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. Sometimes even the people we think we know best may just need a friend to listen to them, laugh with them, and eat Pringles with them.
Lana Wilson (“Miss Americana,” “Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields”) returned to Sundance this year with the surprisingly effective “Look into My Eyes.” I use the word surprisingly because I’m pretty skeptical about people who claim to have psychic abilities, and yet I found the places that Wilson’s film goes to be strikingly resonant. It’s a film that one enters asking, “Is this real?” Before long, one realizes the important question is “Does it matter?” Wilson reframes psychic readings as acts of joint therapy, revealing how these intimate sessions are often as emotionally powerful for the psychic as the client. And while Wilson avoids some of the dicey issues like profiting off grief, there’s no denying these people are finding closure and managing pain through these readings. Why are they inherently deemed lesser than the therapeutic or pharmaceutical industries that profit off misery? Wilson doesn’t need you to believe, but she will make you understand.
Wilson follows seven NYC psychics through their lives, intercutting sessions with personal details about each. They all have interesting stories. Most of them are adjacent to theatre or acting, which should give the skeptics some fuel. Wilson even asks one bluntly how different what she does is from stage improvisation. The answer is not much, but isn’t great improv sort of feeding off the energy of a partner too? It’s truly fascinating how many of them struggle with tragic loss of their own. It’s as if their efforts to contact the other side and prove that the dead can find peace there is also to manage their own grief. If they can contact a client’s loved one who has found comfort in the afterlife, that means theirs has too.
I think some of what these people do is pure imagination (sorry, pet psychic), but I came to realize how little that matters. “Look into My Eyes” contains three of the best scenes of this year’s Sundance—one involving an ER nurse haunted by a child she couldn’t save, one involving a young Black man obsessed with his ancestor’s slavery, and one involving an actress who hasn’t been able to perform since a friend died by suicide. In all of them, these people walk out undeniably changed. They find something that friends, family, therapists, and probably drugs couldn’t provide, a kind of peace that helps them move on. Isn’t that what we all want?
Finally, there’s the harrowing “War Game,” from the excellent Jesse Moss (also here with “Girls State”) and Tony Gerber. The filmmakers attended a role-play event in D.C. on January 6th, 2023. No, that date is not coincidental. A non-partisan group of politicians, defense analysts, intelligence officers, veterans, and experts got together to play out what could happen on January 6th, 2025, with an emphasis on the increasing evidence that there are members of our military who could go rogue and stand in the way of a peaceful transfer of power. The exercise is consistently interesting, but feels a bit shallow at times, focusing almost solely on what would happen if a re-elected President was pressured into using the Insurrection Act. (Spoiler: It would be real bad.)
“War Game” is effective as a conversation starter. While it tries (maybe too) hard to not be explicitly political, it has to be based on what happened in 2021 and might happen in 2025. And I found its most interesting aspect the section in which the team basically fell behind in the information game, allowing the “enemies”—in this case, a religious order who believes the current administration is illegitimate—to essentially control the social game. The truth is that this is happening constantly in the real world as certain factions of the political spectrum use misinformation and those in power don’t often push back enough. The idea that agents could actively skew what could happen on January 6th, 2025 in the public eye and Biden and his team would be too busy talking about what to do next while they lost more and more support is one that I hope this administration strongly considers.
Without spoiling anything, “War Game” ultimately feels a bit too optimistic, believe it or not. The role-play itself is relatively tame, relying on the concept that the rogue factions of the military wouldn’t get extremely violent until the Insurrection Act was evoked. I realize it’s a different role-playing game, but the massive caches of weapons in this country that could be employed by those attempting a coup feel unconsidered in favor of a thought exercise more than the very physical one that could unfold that day.
Having said that, these are flaws of the game and not the film, which is sharply edited to make you feel like you’re there that day, watching as democracy threatens to crumble and fall. The truth is that anyone participating in an exercise like this one has an inherent optimism embedded in the choice to spend their day trying to plan for disaster. I’m happy this project exists to remind us that these men and women, including many still in positions of power, are out there. They WANT to be a part of the solution. I just worry about the ones who don’t.
