Alex Wheeler Movie Ops

Two things tempered fears that Elliot Page’s career would be derailed when he came out as trans:

1. He was a star of an ongoing TV series, The Umbrella Academy, and it was immediately announced that he would remain in his role
2. He had worked as a producer before, so even if roles dried up, there was a good chance he could create them

The latter is how he returns to the big screen, having produced and co-written Close to You with director Dominic Savage in addition to starring. Written, in this case, is a loose term, as the film is largely improvised. The sketched out plot of a trans guy going home after years away…well…the reason Page is a co-writer seems obvious.

To be clear, this is not Page’s life. It’s less autobiographical and more an attempt to capture common experiences among trans men. If you want to know more about his reality, read his memoir, Pageboy. If you want to see the broad strokes of life as a trans guy, then you’ll kind of get that from Close to You.

It’s only kind of because, in an odd choice, Page and Savage split the plot in two. On one side is Page’s Sam attending his father’s birthday celebration with the usual rogue’s gallery of family members. In an almost equally weighted storyline, Sam reconnects with his teenage friend/crush, Katherine (Hillary Baack). Both events stir up complicated memories that clang against the much-changed present. In theory, it’s an astute way to portray aspects of Sam that are entirely separate from his familial role. After all, no one is one-dimensional, and following him outside the fraught family home lets you see the ease he’s gained in other parts of his life. In practice, though, the storylines interrupt each other, fracturing Sam into incomplete pieces instead of making a whole.

Where Close to You shines is in flashes of truth. His time with Katherine gets at the wholly joyous experience of someone seeing you transition and realizing how much it makes sense. They may not know anything about being trans, what they should or shouldn’t say, or what will come in a year or ten, but they delight at the unfolding process. Unfortunately, Baack chooses some blunt statements to get this across, but it provides levity all the same.

And you need that to get through the family stuff, because oof, it’s rough. Everyone is either upset or unsure, tiptoeing around Sam like everything will crumble if the wrong word is said. The fraught dynamics are brought to life without much nuance; scenes are a bit too short, dialogue too abrupt, and the ever-bouncing camera makes everything feel more staged than raw. This is where the film would’ve benefited from a carefully crafted script, ensuring that the complex relationships are rounded out and moments are given time to breathe. Because there’s some Moments here, and from where I was sitting, I needed time to recover. “You weren’t worrying about me when I was actually not okay”!? Yeah, that’s painfully familiar.

To explain the complexity of these moments would take far too much time. It’s best to let their portrayals stand on their own and let you glean what you can of the specifics. What’s more important to understand, and what the film captures throughout, is how being trans becomes The Thing about you for a long time. In the same way that you don’t come out once, you have multiple first, second, and third encounters with people after they find out, each with their own shift towards comfort or discord. It’s exhausting to navigate the journey people go on around you, because it’s a series of charged and boring moments. There’s only so many ways someone will react, and as patterns repeat again and again, your tolerance for the whole process wanes. Some people will make life’s big changes with you and others will get left behind, even if they are family. And at some point, you learn not to apologize for that.

Like most things in Close to You, this is stated pretty bluntly, and the point gets the film’s most explosive scene. And then it trails on for another half hour, working towards an ending that is more gentle but not more incisive. And that’s indicative of the film’s strengths and weaknesses. Structurally and stylistically it’s not very good, and yet it still manages to get across some hard truths.

Release: Available on Netflix
Director: Dominic Savage
Writers: Dominic Savage, Elliot Page
Cast: Elliot Page, Hillary Baack, Peter Outerbridge, Wendy Crewson