Will Ferrell’s latest movie should make you cry

The Netflix documentary aims to break the stigma surrounding transitioning.

Being close friends with someone means that you found a family member out in the middle of the wild that you confide in a way that you wouldn’t with someone who is related to you. Part of that trust is accepting whatever changes that may occur between two strangers turned pals over the length of their lives, whether it be deaths in the family or something in one of them that suddenly dies. For Will Ferrell and his friend and former SNL lead writer Harper Steele, it was about transitioning from a man to a woman.

Let’s be honest. In today’s world and especially this country, the majority of people still don’t understand that concept. They may ask why someone suddenly chooses to make the physical change to their body in order to keep up with the emotional change that happened decades before most likely. Imagine being dealt a hand of cards for life that you couldn’t preorder, and you have the wrong parts.

That was Steele, who wrote Ferrell an email out of the blue one day, telling his SNL amigo (he came on as a writer at the same time the actor was hired) that he was transitioning to live life as a female. After the initial “whoa,” Ferrell had a great idea: Get in a car, head out on a road trip around America, and find answers to his (our) questions that way. The result is Will and Harper, a documentary that aims to move and inform the viewer.

If you’re one of those people who have been dying for more attention to be paid to the stresses and everyday living anxiety of presenting yourself as a different sex than you were before, especially to the souls you know, then this is your fight song. If you’re someone who doesn’t understand the idea or is put off by someone transitioning, then this is a movie for you too.

After all, as the late great Roger Ebert once said, this is what movies are built for: generating empathy for a subject, person or lifestyle that you can’t relate to or have no idea on how one lives that way. Credit to Ferrell for taking the step forward and wanting to get to know his new friend all over again, which may help or save the lives of transsexuals living afraid of how the world will perceive them. As the lady formerly known as Andrew tells Ferrell in the trailer, they can talk about the same things and anything goes in a conversation between them. It’s the same person, just more fearless.

“There are no ground rules between friends.”

Count me in for this potential fall kickoff treasure. From the moment I finished the trailer, I was in. Ferrell is a gifted comedian, but he’s also an underrated actor. When he blends the two and shows an extraordinary amount of compassion, it can rock you. Everything Must Go and Stranger Than Fiction are easy examples, but there are more. He’s someone an audience trusts and will pay attention to, which is why his big involvement and spearheading of the documentary is so vital.

The stigma surrounding transsexuals is as unruly and unnecessary as the whole encompassing mental health. They both require people to understand another perspective that is foreign to them. Ferrell and Steele are tackling the former with both hearts, and I think the result could be a powerful example of documentary film breaking down walls that no other genre has figured out how to overcome.

Bravo to those two, and Netflix for distributing this unconventional drama with a steady amount of comedy, which is fitting for a couple of Saturday Night Live legends. Here’s the trailer. It starts streaming Sept. 27 on Netflix.