Transamerica
Issue #26
By Michael Hastings
Published: December 1st, 2005 | 12:00am
directed by Duncan Tucker
If the title wasn’t already taken, writer-director Duncan Tucker’s debut feature could’ve just as easily been called All About My Mother. Everyone in Transamerica, it seems, is looking for his or her maternal ideal, whether it’s the amoral teen hustler Toby (Kevin Zegers), Bree (Felicity Huffman), or his estranged biological father — who also happens to be a woman trapped in a man’s body. Getting maximum mileage out of its titular pun, Transamerica is a cross-country road movie wherein Bree is ordered by her therapist to come to terms with her past before facing her future, which in this case happens to be the operation that will once and for all remove the last vestige of her manhood. Thus begins a rocky bonding process in which Toby — unaware of his relationship to this odd woman who’s come to chaperone him — makes life hell for the heretofore prim and proper Bree (Quel dommage is her preferred exclamation).
The script is chock full of the sort of reliably transgressive subject matter that’s been fueling Sundance hopefuls for years now, but Transamerica has an ace up its sleeve in Huffman. The idea to have a woman play an M-to-F tranny may smack of stunt casting, but the actress erases any lingering doubt within the film’s first few minutes. Adding a throaty, husky tenor to her voice and clomping around bow-legged in hyper-feminine duds, Huffman brilliantly pinpoints the physical details of gender in flux; beyond that, she summons a naivete that can shift from hilarious to heartbreaking without notice. Huffman gives Bree a vulnerability that’s at once genuine, affected, and hormone supplement-induced — and what could be more motherly than that?
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