David O'ConnellTransamerica
January 12th 2009 04:31
It must have been a torturous decision for debutante writer/director Duncan Tucker when casting the lead role for his 2005 trans-gender road movie. Should he actually cast a man as Bree – formerly Stanley - the pre-operative transsexual who feels like a woman trapped in a man’s body? A bolder stroke was eventually decided upon: he chose the attractive Felicity Huffman and layered her under such skillfully conceived make-up that she assumes the credible physical appearance of a man who desperately wants to continue life as a woman.
Huffman’s performance is a tour-de-force, with every shred of credibility invested in the film relying upon her portrayal convincing a cynical audience of her gender. She gets everything right: a subtle male inflection in her voice, a self-conscious walk and a fragile state of mind so purposely conveyed in every other phrase of her body’s language.
Bree is a week away from her much anticipated surgery, and needs the final approval of her therapist – something she won’t be granted now that an experimental night of passion from the past has come back to haunt her life with unreasonable ramifications. She discovers she has a 17 year old son in a New York lock-up and needs to atone by making contact and confronting her past before she’s allowed to consider her future.
Toby (Kevin Zegers) turns out to be a small-time hustler used to selling himself to men for drug money and hampered by daydreams of making porn films in L.A some day. Bree, taking him into her care under the guise of a magnanimous church organization, would like to offload him to a relative but with no promising leads, low finances, and a reluctant Toby in tow she decides on a road trip with a detour through his old home state Kentucky. It turns out Toby’s step-father was a sexually-abusive bully and so they’re left with little other option than to persist in the direction of L.A and that impending date with Bree’s surgeon.
After having their car and cash stolen, and struggling to come to terms with one another's insistent presence, the pair are left desolate and desperate. With the help of a generous, lonely Indian, Calvin (Graham Greene), they make it as far as Bree’s parents' house looking for more financial favours. A circus ensues however with her mother, Elizabeth (Fionnula Flanagan), still reeling from the shame of her son Stanley’s morally repugnant conversion, putting on a colourful, highly exaggerated display. She’s especially distraught to discover she has a grandson and begins fawning over him as if he were a pitiful innocent lost in the woods of his ‘father’s’ perverse, sexually-confused world.
This whole sequence is Tucker’s only concession to exceeding the boundaries of his firmly-established tone until now, with a series of admittedly funny but broadly played scenes involving Elizabeth, father Murray (Burt Young), and sister Sidney (Carrie Preston).
One of Tucker’s most impressive achievements, other than coaxing an astonishing performance from Huffman, is his non-judgmental stance – there is never attempt to denigrate Bree or Toby other than voyeuristically, through the eyes of casual strangers: certainly stones are cast in Bree’s direction, mostly from her stricken mother, but despite the secrets withheld about their true relationship, she and Toby seem able to spot the outsider mentality in one another that’s allowed them to survive and come closer to a mutual, silent understanding of their place in the scheme of things.
Huffman is deserving of every accolade for her portrayal of Bree: she breathes sustaining life into this character with a convincing, transformative performance. Zegers plays the sullen Toby well enough and though he has some screen presence, there isn’t a lot of nuance in his acting.
Though the sum of its parts may be greater than its whole, Transamerica proves to be an engaging and offbeat road movie. There’s a fittingly low-key ending too which seems to suggest that, minefields crossed and self-destruction narrowly averted, the pair can still foster the hope of forging a relationship out of the remnants of what they already know and have come to accept about one another.
Huffman’s performance is a tour-de-force, with every shred of credibility invested in the film relying upon her portrayal convincing a cynical audience of her gender. She gets everything right: a subtle male inflection in her voice, a self-conscious walk and a fragile state of mind so purposely conveyed in every other phrase of her body’s language.
Bree is a week away from her much anticipated surgery, and needs the final approval of her therapist – something she won’t be granted now that an experimental night of passion from the past has come back to haunt her life with unreasonable ramifications. She discovers she has a 17 year old son in a New York lock-up and needs to atone by making contact and confronting her past before she’s allowed to consider her future.
Toby (Kevin Zegers) turns out to be a small-time hustler used to selling himself to men for drug money and hampered by daydreams of making porn films in L.A some day. Bree, taking him into her care under the guise of a magnanimous church organization, would like to offload him to a relative but with no promising leads, low finances, and a reluctant Toby in tow she decides on a road trip with a detour through his old home state Kentucky. It turns out Toby’s step-father was a sexually-abusive bully and so they’re left with little other option than to persist in the direction of L.A and that impending date with Bree’s surgeon.
Felicity Huffman as Bree
After having their car and cash stolen, and struggling to come to terms with one another's insistent presence, the pair are left desolate and desperate. With the help of a generous, lonely Indian, Calvin (Graham Greene), they make it as far as Bree’s parents' house looking for more financial favours. A circus ensues however with her mother, Elizabeth (Fionnula Flanagan), still reeling from the shame of her son Stanley’s morally repugnant conversion, putting on a colourful, highly exaggerated display. She’s especially distraught to discover she has a grandson and begins fawning over him as if he were a pitiful innocent lost in the woods of his ‘father’s’ perverse, sexually-confused world.
Bree with son Toby (Kevin Zegers)
This whole sequence is Tucker’s only concession to exceeding the boundaries of his firmly-established tone until now, with a series of admittedly funny but broadly played scenes involving Elizabeth, father Murray (Burt Young), and sister Sidney (Carrie Preston).
One of Tucker’s most impressive achievements, other than coaxing an astonishing performance from Huffman, is his non-judgmental stance – there is never attempt to denigrate Bree or Toby other than voyeuristically, through the eyes of casual strangers: certainly stones are cast in Bree’s direction, mostly from her stricken mother, but despite the secrets withheld about their true relationship, she and Toby seem able to spot the outsider mentality in one another that’s allowed them to survive and come closer to a mutual, silent understanding of their place in the scheme of things.
They receive the assistance of lonely, kind-hearted Calvin (Graham Greene)
Huffman is deserving of every accolade for her portrayal of Bree: she breathes sustaining life into this character with a convincing, transformative performance. Zegers plays the sullen Toby well enough and though he has some screen presence, there isn’t a lot of nuance in his acting.
Though the sum of its parts may be greater than its whole, Transamerica proves to be an engaging and offbeat road movie. There’s a fittingly low-key ending too which seems to suggest that, minefields crossed and self-destruction narrowly averted, the pair can still foster the hope of forging a relationship out of the remnants of what they already know and have come to accept about one another.
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