Transamerica: Movie & DVD Review (2006)

(Originally published 2006)

You could call her desperate. She might even agree.

Felicity Huffman's Bree, a Los Angeles-based, pre-op transsexual male a week away from the knife, is on the cusp of calling it quits with her gender when into her life comes something of a surprise. Apparently, when Bree wasn't in heels or on hormones or in a dress--and long before she tossed her birth name, Stanley, to the curb--she fathered a child with a former girlfriend, who has since committed suicide.

Their 17-year-old boy, Toby (Kevin Zegers), now lives in squalor in New York City, where he hustles to pay the bills and has done the sort of drugs that tend to land one in jail. That's where Toby is stewing when Bree is given an ultimatum by her therapist, Margaret (Elizabeth Pena), who demands that Bree either visit Toby and deal with the issues at hand, or the operation is off.

Since the latter is out of the question for Bree, off she goes to New York, where she decides to pose as a Christian fundamentalist missionary eager to help young people like Toby. Having a transsexual play a church lady might sound like a deliberate stab at the far right--and maybe it is--but given Bree's conservative drag and her refusal to use bad language, it isn't the stretch it might seem on paper.

Still, good luck to Bree. What she finds in New York is a murky teenager who aspires to a life of making pornographic movies, not exactly the career move a newfound parent would choose for their child.

From first-time writer director Duncan Tucker, "Transamerica" occasionally feels like a sitcom cross-dressed as a drama, and vice versa. There are a few big laughs here--and one beautifully unexpected moment that comes as a genuine shock--but the undercurrent is serious. When Bree decides to bring Toby back to his stepfather in Kentucky, which collapses for reasons that won't be revealed here, the story becomes a road movie about Bree and Toby's journey across America and into each other's lives. That's a cliché, so it's good news for the movie that it's driven by its unique characters and not by its plot.

With Fionnula Flanagan as Bree's scary mother, Burt Young as her father and Graham Greene as the man who romantically fancies her, the best part of "Transamerica" is Huffman's Academy Award-nominated performance. She's so good in the role, she keeps at bay the average film threatening to seep through.

What she mines in Bree is quiet dignity, desperation, fear and humor, the soul of a person who believes they were born the wrong gender and who is brave enough to face society and discrimination in an effort to fix that wrong. For the actress, that turns out to be the easy part. What's difficult is that she had to overcome the rather formidable hurdle of being a woman playing a man who is one step removed from being a woman.

Not exactly easy, so watching this talented co-star of "Desperate Housewives" pull it off is something of a thrill.

Grade: B