Tribeca 2005: Transamerica

Felicity Huffman's star sign is a weird thing. More sexy than pretty, and certainly the least glamourous of the Desperate Housewives, there's still something undeniably heteronormative about her. If every star (or star-like character actress) has their Central Casting label, she'd be something like a somewhat more "serious" version of screwball-era Rosalind Russell - The Guy's Gal; the coworker that everyone's a little afraid of, and nobody would admit to being attracted to, but whom everybody secretly sort of wants to nail.

That star persona lingers on the edges of Duncan Tucker's Transamerica, the film for which Huffman won a Best Actress award last weekend at the Tribeca Film Festival. Her performance, as Bree, a male-to-female just-barely-pre-op transsexual who takes a road trip with the son she never knew she had, is a tricky thing: watching the film, I never forgot that this was the actress that I know to be William H. Macy's wife; at the same time, I never once felt like Bree wasn't a biological man.
Bree is almost tragically unworldly transsexual telemarketer/busgirl, saving up for her final sexual re-assignment surgery. Right before the operation, she becomes aware that her one fumbling attempt at teenage sex produced a son. That son, Toby (played extremely well by Kevin Zeggers), is now 17 and needs bailing out of jail. so Bree heads to New York, pretends to be a Christian missionary, takes the kid with her on a road trip, tries to get rid of him but gets sucked into his world, tries to hide her true identity whilst badgering him for the dirt on his, etc etc etc.

Transamerica works a lot better than it has any right to. It wrangles a lot of coming-out, coming-of-age, coming-to-terms cliches into a unique, surprisingly moving beast. Still, there is a strange cartoonish tone to all of the performances, including Huffman's. When characters who take themselves resolutely seriously speak lines like "I'm gonna go get a career in the movies," it's hard to know which side of the irony fence we're on.

We figure out quickly that no one can be taken at face value. Despite her secrets, Bree is the most trusting and least duplicitous person in the film. We start to realise that Toby has been touched by enough queerness that he'd be the first to except Bree's true sexuality; the real problem is the paternity issue, and the fact that Bree keeps that secret gaurded until the film's denouement produces a volume of incest tension that's (not unsettlingly) sexy, yet (unsettlingly) never feels fully resolved.

What ends up becoming clear is that we're dealing with a batch of characters that are extremely un-self-aware, and yet uniquely self-concious. Bree and Toby, especially, plan what external image they're going to deliver before they have any idea what they think or feel. There's a gap there, and Transamerica lives in that gap, at times teasing it apart even as it works to bring its fractured characters together.

In the end, the least shocking thing about Transamerica is the way it handles alternative sexuality. Where it breaks ground, and where it excels, is in its delicate, complex treatment of "unconditional" love. It's a screwball family comedy in a bad wig and hyper matchy-matchy lavender seperates - but it'll sneakily win over even the staunchest aesthete if given have a chance.