Dir: Duncan Tucker, US, 2005, 103 mins
Cast: Felicity Huffman, Kevin Zegers, Fionnula Flanagan
Review by Philippa Bradnock
Bree (Huffman) is a pre-operative Californian male-to-female (MTF) transsexual who is waiting for her final operation. She receives a phone call from an unknown son, Toby (Zegers), whom she had fathered years before and who is in prison in New York. To her fury, Bree’s counsellor postpones signing the consent for her final operation until Bree has explored her feelings about Toby. She travels to New York and, posing as a Christian do-gooder (from the ‘Church of the Potential Father’), bails Toby out. They take a road trip back West, stopping at their respective familial homes and discover more about each other in the process.
Felicity Huffman (better known as Lynette in TV’s Desperate Housewives) was nominated for Best Actress at this year’s Oscars for her role as Bree. Certainly her transformation from suburban sophisticate to awkward transsexual is reminiscent of the efforts of other actors to net a gold statuette with ‘worthy’ parts. Transsexuality, it appears, is the new autism in the movie world. Director Tucker’s decision to cast a woman to play a man becoming a woman is unexpected. To cast a woman who is known most for her role in a series about glamorous housewives seems almost foolhardy. But Huffman’s months of voice coaching and movement lessons rapidly evaporate any doubts about her ability to play Bree convincingly.
The film is very much a character piece, with Huffman’s lead in every scene. The American landscape, idolised in many road movies, provides a picturesque but anonymous backdrop where cities are reduced to generic suburbs and the country is granted no long establishing shots. Bree starts as a novelty. Speaking in an erratic tenor she is all too-thick makeup and nylon pastel suits with flyaway scarves to cover her Adam’s apple. She is unbearably self-conscious; in an early scene she teeters past teenage boys playing ball and her hat blows off. She hurries back, hunches down despairingly to retrieve it, conscious of her every tiny movement and its potential to betray her ‘real’ identity.
This brittleness makes for difficult viewing because we never settle into a reliable conception of which Bree is, but then she doesn’t know herself. The same is true of Toby’s manipulative but childlike rent boy, caught between his desire for genuine affection and his compulsion to filter everything through the hyper-sexuality of the abused child. They slip and slide around each other and play out their respective adopted characters until they reach Bree’s parents’ house where she displays a sterner resolve. Her horrified mother grabs at her crotch to check whether she is ‘still a boy’ and Bree snatches her hand back and presses it to her swollen breast, triumphant in the change. After Toby’s abusive stepfather and Bree’s controlling mother their unusual relationship starts to look positively healthy.
Despite the potential for sentimentality, Tucker’s film steers clear of schmaltz, by the end neither Toby nor Bree have broken entirely out of their individual prisons, but they have made a tentative bond. The title plays both on the duo’s journey and the transgender people who go unnoticed in society (‘We walk among you’ says one to a surprised Toby). In Transamerica small people try hard to live the unassuming lives that the rest of us take for granted or resent. For a little while it might remind us of our luck.
Discuss this film here
Pathé Distribution Ltd. have announced the UK Region 2 DVD release of Transamerica for 24th July 2006 priced at £19.99.
Extras include:
- Commentary with Duncan Tucker
- Conversation with Kevin Zegers and Duncan Tucker
- Conversation with Felicity Huffman and Kevin Zegers
- Dolly Parton Music Video
- Behind the Scenes of the Music Video
- Cast and Crew Biographies
- Out Takes
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