DownStream – TUDUM! Part One: Documentary

With two weeks left to go until the Oscar Blitz begins, a good chunk of time will be spent doing my utmost to cram in as much cinematic content as possible. Just like last year, Netflix has pulled out all the proverbial stops in order to bribe Academy voters into giving the streamer as much hardware as possible. It’s a cynical strategy that I don’t enjoy, and quite frankly every year they get closer to winning Best Picture is another nail in the theatrical model’s coffin.

At the same time, though, it’s not like I can change anything. All I can do is hope for the best and use whatever avenues are available to me in order to clear as many prospective nominees as possible before my focus shifts to full-on Oscar category coverage, working only with the candidates we have rather than the ones I want.

So while I’m against the process, I at least am glad that the streaming service of record at least gives us a convenient guide to their marketing priorities through their For Your Consideration page. This handy-dandy hub allows viewers to know exactly what the company thinks is worthy of prestige honors, and once the Academy releases the shortlists, the coverage plan can be easily followed. I took care of biz last year thanks to this same method, and it only makes sense to continue it ahead of the 2025 ceremony.

Just like last time, I’ll divide these batch reviews into groups based on their respective formats, starting with documentaries. Netflix put forward several features and shorts, with one in the latter column making the Documentary Short semis and three making the first cut in the former. I won’t bother with the short until nominations come out, and even then only if it’s in the final five. Short films are hard enough to track down, and it’s not worth my time unless I can clear the entire shortlist. But when it comes to the features, it’s a simple proposition, especially since I make a concerted effort to clear the 15 contenders every year if at all possible.

So sit back, relax, and hopefully enjoy what the Big Red N has to offer for the nonfiction enthusiast!

Will & Harper

This one is actually up for two awards potentially, as it’s on the shortlist for both Documentary Feature and Original Song. This is also by a considerable margin the most accessible doc for the casual viewer, as its stars/subjects are well-known figures in the entertainment industry. Directed by Josh Greenbaum (known in the comedy world for Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar and Strays), Will & Harper is thankfully also one of the best films overall for 2024, a funny, tender, heartfelt, and even-handed look at the human side of one of the hot button culture war issues that has been grotesquely exploited over the past few years.

The film features Will Ferrell and Harper Steele (née Andrew), who began working at Saturday Night Live together in 1995. Ferrell obviously became a megastar, while Steele worked behind the scenes, rising to the role of Head Writer on the show, and the two became close friends. During the COVID pandemic, Steele came out as transgender and had top surgery, becoming Harper. The news came as a shock to Will, as I’m sure it does for a lot of people, but in Harper’s case, almost no one saw it coming, as she was from Iowa and always presented as gruff, rural, “man’s man” who liked going to dive bars, drinking “shitty” beer, and exploring America’s heartland.

Now that she’s revealed herself as a trans woman, however, Harper is unsure if she’s still welcome at all the places and pastimes she used to joyfully frequent. So for the sake of her safety and to strengthen their friendship, she and Will decide to do a cross-country road trip over the course of 17 days, from New York to Santa Monica, to see just how the country reacts to someone like Harper in person rather than through the anonymity of the internet and the 24-hour news cycle, and to learn whether or not Harper can still participate in her favorite activities.

The journey unfolds somewhat as expected, with more liberal areas like NYC, DC, and LA being much friendlier and openly accepting than the likes of Indiana (they attend a Pacers game and meet the governor, unaware that he had just signed a bill banning gender-affirming care for minors) and Texas (Ferrell doing a steakhouse challenge as his Sherlock Holmes character draws massive online vitriol towards Harper simply for being there). However, there are also surprising grace points along the way, with Harper’s family being confused but loving and supportive, meeting another woman in Illinois who transitioned later in life, and being welcomed at a small hole-in-the-wall bar in Oklahoma.

Ferrell essentially serves two roles. The most overt is to be a meat shield for Harper. Given his fame and affability, he’s an easy conduit for people who’ve never met a trans person before to get comfortable with Harper’s presence and acknowledge her basic humanity, that she’s functionally no different than anyone else, despite the ways several hateful entities try to use all trans individuals as strawmen for repressive laws. The second is as an audience cipher. He not only asks Harper the questions that any of us might have in his shoes, trying to figure out what’s in bounds and what’s not (for example, when my best friend came out to me as gay nearly a decade ago, he basically gave me and one of our other friends a free Q&A session to alleviate any confusions we had), he also stands in for the myriad folks who simply need time to adjust to this new normal. Part of the reason why it’s so easy for hatemongers to vilify the trans community is because they’re such a small proportion of the population (approximately 0.3%), and because in the age of political correctness, there is something of a societal expectation for instant acceptance, even for those who’ve never encountered such diversity. A lot of well-meaning, good people simply need time to catch up, and in our fraught political landscape where any minority group is ripe for scapegoating, it’s far too convenient for those who feel overwhelmed to default to bigotry and resistance.

That’s where Ferrell does his best work. He and Harper aren’t there to force an agenda or blindside anybody, but to help those who haven’t been exposed find a way to ease into tolerance and get back to basic kindness. In a perfect world, we wouldn’t need that, but reality dictates that we do. It also helps that Ferrell himself is far from infallible here, recognizing as he goes that he’s made his own missteps. That second-guessing is crucial to eventual understanding, and it shows the benefit of just trying to do a little better each time. Trans people (and really any member of a marginalized group) have their own obstacles and hurdles to overcome that are beyond important, but the film correctly acknowledges that everyone in their respective spheres also has a process they have to go through, and for some it just takes longer than others.

Thankfully, there’s plenty of humor to go along with the heartstring tugs. By the midway point of the trip, Ferrell begins playfully pestering Harper to stop in every city they enter just so he can go to a Dunkin Donuts, and it’s just the right side of irritatingly hilarious. The two decide they need a theme song for the trip, so they commission Kristen Wiig to write one for them, the now-shortlisted “Harper and Will Go West,” which is both touching and deeply funny.

All of this combines to give us a brutally honest yet endearing look at the trans issue that most have not been able to see. In our larger media diet we either get over-the-top fictional narratives that might be well-intended but often feel manufactured, or we get pure demonization from those who would sooner see the whole community dead than contentedly left alone (again, given their small numbers relative to the rest of the country, it’s amazing how much time, effort, and energy is used just to screw them over for no gain), but very rarely do we just see a person living as themselves, just being normal for want of a better term. That’s what Will & Harper brilliantly accomplishes, and while a celebrity-focused documentary isn’t always favored by Academy voters, it’s the best one I’ve seen so far.

Grade: A

The Remarkable Life of Ibelin

From a story that highlights the unfortunate cesspool that the online world has created, we now go to one that reminds us all that there is a goodness to the digital space. Benjamin Ree, previously shortlisted for The Painter and the Thief, brings us an emotionally devastating follow-up in The Remarkable Life of Ibelin, a film that will absolutely kick your heart right in the dick, but you’ll be grateful for it.

A young Norwegian man named Mats Steen was born with a rare condition called Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy, which sadly doomed him to a short life where his motor functions would continually deteriorate until his death at the age of 25. For the last decade of his life, he disappeared into the escape that was video games, leading his parents and sister to worry that he’d never get to experience the joys of life in what little time he had. He’d never socialize, make friends, or fall in love. In addition to his gaming, he maintained a blog towards the end where he spoke openly about his illness, and upon his passing, he left his family the password so that they could tell his readers. The flood of condolences that came in revealed that Mats had in fact had all those key experiences, just online, through World of Warcraft, where he roleplayed as a helpful “private investigator” named Ibelin.

Similar to the “Make Love, Not Warcraft” episode of South Park, Mats’ family and friends used transcripts from their interactions within the game to piece together the life he truly did live while confined to the computer, with animators using the game engine and actual character models to play it all out, supplemented by interviews with his guildmates’ real-life counterparts. We see Ibelin help a mother and her autistic son become closer, fall for a girl and fight for her in the real world when her parents take away her screen time and access to the community, and even a fair share of angsty drama when the fears about keeping his condition secret clash with his frustration in missing out on so many in-person encounters. He takes it upon himself to support so many, but can’t accept it from anyone else, lest they treat him differently out of pity.

This is the kind of beautiful yet heartbreaking movie that cuts me right to the quick, and reminded me quite fondly of two of my favorite bits of pop culture. The first, obviously, is It’s a Wonderful Life. Like George Bailey himself, Mats/Ibelin’s story is about how one man’s life touches so many others, even if they don’t realize the impact they’re having, and when you devote yourself to the good of your friends, that love finds oddly inspiring ways of coming back to you. The second, strangely enough, is Sword Art Online. The seventh light novel in the series (adapted into the second half of Season 2 in the anime), published in 2011, is the famous “Mother’s Rosario” arc, where heroine Asuna meets Yuuki, a player in the Alfheim Online game so skilled that she cannot be bested in 1-on-1 combat and has earned the moniker of “Absolute Sword.” However, it is revealed that Yuuki is terminally ill and lives full-time within the virtual world of ALO, resulting in one of the series’ biggest tearjerker moments as she deteriorates. What happens with Mats/Ibelin in the real world and the game mirrors this story, with an ending that will leave you in a puddle of your own saline.

This is one of the saddest movies I’ve seen this year, but like Memoir of a Snail before it, it’s also extremely life-affirming. There’s so much misery in this world that it’s sometimes hard to see the goodness in it, and given all the nastiness and hate that has spawned in the digital age, it can often feel like the internet was, on the whole, a mistake. But stories like Ibelin’s are there to remind you that happiness comes in so many forms, and that even if you can’t always see it, there are real heroes out there. You just have to know where to look.

Grade: A-

Daughters

Angela Patton, who co-directs Daughters (along with Natalie Rae), is the CEO of an advocacy group called “Girls for a Change,” which creates programs to empower young girls of color. One of those initiatives is “Date with Dad,” a father-daughter dance for young women whose fathers are currently incarcerated. That’s the crux of Daughters, where Patton and Rae highlight four pairs of girls and their dads preparing for this special occasion.

The girls range in age from 4 years old (the adorably precocious Aubrey) to 15 (high schooler Raziah), each of them having a unique experience growing up with their fathers on the inside. They make the best of things, and they’re obviously anxious and hopeful to see their dads, as they’re all in a state of imprisonment where physical, in-person visits aren’t allowed (the best they get is the old phone conversation across a pane of glass bit). Meanwhile, the men have to go through a group therapy program in the penitentiary in order to earn the privilege of this dance. They’re eventually lent dapper suits for the event.

A lot of this stuff is interesting on the surface, particularly the priority focus on the girls’ experience, but I have to say, this film left me wanting. For starters, the dance itself happens at the midway point, which made me wonder what we could possibly use to fill the remaining time. It’s basically an extended epilogue where we see what happens to the four pairs (two of the dads are paroled, while two others remain locked up), and how their relationships can begin mending. In Aubrey’s case in particular, there’s a lot to go over, as father Keith is given a final sentence of 10 years (he was hoping for seven) after the dance, meaning they won’t get to be together again until she’s in high school.

But while the film is right to not make this all about the men’s respective crimes, it also wrongly shies away from them in a way that feels slightly dishonest. There’s no sugarcoating or whitewashing of their pasts, but the movie frames its narrative as if the separations are casualties of the prison industrial complex and a societal aplomb for mass incarceration, when that’s just not the case. For example, Keith was convicted on multiple counts of bank fraud and identity theft. He expresses remorse, but I think most of us would find 10 years to be a fair sentence. Similarly, Raziah’s father Alonzo, who gets 30 years, literally murdered someone. He’s lucky that he’ll ever get out, but his postscript and onscreen text makes it seem like this is some sort of tragedy. This isn’t a case where a non-violent drug offender got the book thrown at him due to institutional racism. He straight up killed someone. I feel for Raziah (though she honestly seems the most well-adjusted of the four featured girls), but he done fucked up royal, and his punishment is just (some would even say too lenient).

I don’t think it was the intention of the filmmakers to muddy things like that, but that’s how it came off to me. The emotional throughline took precedence over objective honesty, and that just didn’t work from where I sat. The overall message is positive, and I do genuinely care about what happens to all of these young women who were dealt a shit hand, but that doesn’t extend to me feeling sympathy for serious felonies.

Grade: B-

***

That’s all for this edition. I’ll have more to come over the next fortnight with animated and narrative features as we await nominations. How much will Netflix’s marketing binge pay off? We’ll soon see.

Join the conversation in the comments below! Have you seen these films? Which was your favorite? Do you think you could beat Will Ferrell in a steak-eating contest? Let me know! And remember, you can follow me on Twitter (fuck “X”) and subscribe to my YouTube channel for even more content, and check out the entire BTRP Media Network at btrpmedia.com!