“Transamerica” is about discomfort, longing and belonging. No wonder first-time director Duncan Tucker chose to tell the bittersweet saga of Bree, a pre-op transsexual who must deal with her past before gaining her future, as a road movie.
Hitting the two-lane blacktop is one of the go-to genres of American cinema. The road flick gives a filmmaker a fluid way to meditate on desire and character (often by having the protagonist meet a number of characters along the way). Whoever sits gripping the wheel partakes in the conversation about what makes America – and what makes each of us American.
Felicity Huffman’s performance as Bree is striking in much the way Charlize Theron’s was in “Monster.” And similarly, the critical response to the Desperate Housewife’s raw, rare turn threatens to puff up a modest movie.
Not that Tucker’s ambitions are meek. They’re not. But he had the good sense to use a tried-and-true form to explore Bree’s emotionally epic drama of wanting to have a body that feels physically in keeping with one’s sense of self.
At the outset of “Transamerica,” we find Bree living in her humble California home and working at a Mexican restaurant. In addition to waiting tables, she’s getting into telemarketing. Bree believes she’s living “stealth” – under the radar and the ridicule of society. Yet her discomfort in her skin issues a silent scream she plans to end with an operation.
A week before her much-ached-for transformation, Bree learns she has a son. “I thought you were a virgin,” says her therapist, Margaret (an engaging Elizabeth Peña).
Not quite. In a prior life, Bree was Stanley. And Stanley turns out to have fathered a son with a college girlfriend, who has died.
Bree learns this during a phone call from New York City. Son Toby is in jail. Stanley was listed as his father.
Without belaboring his point, Tucker makes it clear that the psychological hurdles a transsexual has to leap over before going under the knife are high.
When Bree tells Margaret about Toby, she fears she’s in for the highest hurdle of all. Why else mention the news only after updating her on telemarketing quotas and buying a lambs-wool cardigan? Tucker and star Huffman have a powerful way with bittersweet timing. Like this scene, there are many moments here that are funny-sad.
Margaret makes it clear she won’t give consent for the operation without some serious reckoning.
Kevin Zegers plays Toby, a 17-year-old, drug-sniffing hustler. He believes Bree is some do-gooder dressed in pastels who will help him get to Hollywood. He hopes to become an adult-entertainment actor.
Bree encourages one part of Toby’s fantasy, telling him that she’s from the Church of the Potential Father. But her own dream entails leaving Toby with his stepfather in Kentucky and high-tailing it back to L.A. in time for her appointment with a truer destiny.
As Bree/Stanley’s mother, Fionnula Flanagan offers a funny-painful lesson in parental modeling. Graham Greene gives a personable turn as Calvin, an American Indian cowboy who takes a shine to Bree.
While the lead character in “Transamerica” isn’t familiar, a number of the genre twists are.
Where this journey ends shows that writer-director Tucker gets the power of understatement.
*** | “Transamerica”
R for sexual content, nudity, language and drug use|1 hour, 43 minutes|ROAD TRIP|Written and directed by Duncan Tucker; photography by Stephen Kazmierski; starring Felicity Huffman, Kevin Zegers, Elizabeth Peña, Fionnula Flanagan, Graham Greene, Burt Young, Carrie Preston|Opens today at the Esquire.
