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Transamerica January 22, 2006 |
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Road movies are a dime a dozen, when one pops up, you’re best just to play along, hoping the director can figure out a way to toy with the formula just enough to make the film slightly more original than last week’s road movie. Usually they can’t, and you’re stuck with the same formula; one or two loners, either lost or poor, embarking on an adventure, usually cross country, whose various stops along the way fill up the bulk of the narrative, each stop being more extraordinary than the last, until point X is reached, and a conclusion is at hand. Of course this can be fun, especially when the travelers are likeable, and their subsequent adventures are both believable and entertaining, like Barry Kane and Roger Thornhill, bouncing cross country to prove their innocence in Hitchcock’s great road adventures “Saboteur” and “North by Northwest”, the latter being perhaps the greatest road movie of all time, but nobody quite gets it as right as Hitchcock used to do (in modern times, something like “Sideways” would be the gold standard), and we’re usually left with travel fatigue, as if the drive home will be too much after an exhaustive big screen trip into oblivion. I use this standard intro here because of the local premiere of Felicity Huffman’s much acclaimed “Transamerica”, which, for its unconventional story and groundbreaking lead performance, is a nominal road picture, with an added chestnut thrown in for good measure, father-son bonding. What makes it tolerable, and at least better than most films of this ilk, is that the son doesn’t know the person he’s traveling with is his father, and the father, bless him, doesn’t want the son to know either, for, after all, he’s dressed like a woman, and is one surgery away from achieving a complete sexual transformation, a subject an unsuspecting teenage boy might find shocking coming from his estranged father. If the goal of a director attempting the much practiced road formula is to present the formula with a new twist as to not look too unoriginal, than writer/director Duncan Tucker does it well with “Transamerica”, for I can’t recall ever having seen a road film about a transsexual and his bastard son, traveling the states in a green station wagon with secrets and dreams waiting for them at the end of the long tunnel. For this twist, the genre is thankful, now if only we could expect the same from the crop of 2006 road pictures we’re inevitably going to see, than maybe the tired formula wouldn’t be so boring. The best thing about the formula is that during the travels there’s much time for characterizations and dramatic revelations, for which “Transamerica” handles with care. The plot is simple, on the eve of her final sexual transformation surgery, Bree (Huffman), a male-to-female transsexual, receives a phone call, apparently she fathered a son 17 years ago in college and that son is now in jail in New York City, needing help, and a father figure. Bree’s therapist, Margaret (Elizabeth Pena), won’t consent to the surgery unless Bree explores this new unwanted avenue in her life, so she agrees to chaperone the wayward youth back to L.A. to look for his stepfather, never intending to tell the boy how they’re related, instead posing as a Christian volunteer to justify the help. Inevitably, the road trip is fraught with tension, and eventual bonding, as the maternal instinct in Bree begins to kick in, and likewise, the boy (Kevin Zegers) begins to trust Bree, even after he finds out she’s a man, which is delicately approached, and smartly written. “My body may be a work in progress,” she says to her son, in a sympathetic attempt at a life lesson, “but there’s nothing wrong with my soul.” Along the way the two encounter various drifters, including a kind trucker who sings Bree a song one night after their stuff is stolen, but the key relationship is obviously between Bree and the teenager, as, not unlike in “Rain Man”, a long trip cramped into a stuffy car eventually brings the two seemingly opposite creatures to a mutual understanding, and an emotional state built on simple familial caring, if not a buried form of love. Felicity Huffman recently won a Golden Globe award for her remarkable performance here as a man desperately wanting to be a woman, and if it looks almost effortless, there’s tremendous credit due, because I’m sure it’s not easy being a woman and effectively contorting your voice to sound like a man’s interpretation of a feminine sound. The cheap way would have been to simply use her own voice, but since it’s so recognizable now from “Desperate Housewives”, the minute we meet Bree we know it’s altered, and to keep that up through an entire picture, to have us believing the sincerity of this character’s wishes to become a woman, is amazing, and the main reason why the film is better than your average road movie. It may suffer the trappings visually and aesthetically from a first time director working on a tiny budget, but the core relationship is touching, and Huffman’s performance is one for the ages, making “Transamerica” a road film worth the trip. “Transamerica” is playing in Buffalo. by Adam Suraf
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