After wrapping up the final season of The Umbrella Academy, Elliot Page is not waiting around for his next project. After transitioning on the Netflix show and starting a production company, his latest Close to You marks the first time Page plays a transman in a movie. While this statement feels long overdue, his performance is a testament to how we’ve been deprived of a great actor for far too long.
Written and directed by Dominic Savage with a story by him and Page, Close to You takes place in a 24-hour period. As Sam (Page) wakes up in his apartment, eats breakfast and converses with his roommate, we learn that he hasn’t been home in quite some time due to his family’s reaction to his transition. Though they are now accepting, they are clearly uncomfortable still and make the majority of their interactions with him about his identity.
As he takes the train home, he sees an old friend from high school, Katherine (Hillary Baack), and though she is awkward at first, the two rekindle what they clearly had decades before. Baack and Page worked together on the environmental thriller The East in 2013, and the two’s quiet chemistry is still clearly there.
When Sam gets to his family home, the rest of the narrative is split between his strained time with his family and later interactions with Katherine. Despite his parents trying to make his homecoming normal, mother Miriam (Wendy Crewson) bursts into tears randomly, placing the emotional labor on Sam’s shoulders, and father Jim (Peter Outerbridge) skirts around it in the beginning, something Sam’s siblings do as well.
Savage’s dialogue is most interesting when these family moments. Sam’s time with Katherine seems to pointlessly linger at times, but the tension between Sam and his family is one of the more fascinating elements of this film and where Page comes alive. Switching between righteous anger and calculated quiet, every word out of his mouth during these scenes feels like a lived experience for Page. As Sam’s past is revealed through dialogue and a transphobic brother-in-law is outed, Page rides the wave of these improved scenes like a pro. While the pacing is extremely slow at times and the plot lacking, your eyes can’t leave Page.
Close to You proves that Page could play literally anything and bring a sense of nuance and empathy to a part that few actors can. While the formation of his Pageboy production company will keep him busy and presumably get him back on the big screen, here’s hoping that Hollywood will see past its transphobia and hire him to tell more kinds of stories.
Close to You is in theaters now via Greenwich Entertainment.
