Review of Transamerica (2005) by Daniel P — 27 Jan 2011

Transamerica, an unconventional road movie, to say the least, hits more than it misses, but for a supposedly boundary-breaking film, I found that it only scratched the surface of the kind of story it's trying to tell (man meets the son he didn't know he had and son meets father, but father looks and acts and feels like a... mother, I guess?). What I liked about this film was that it was very realistic in its way.

I think what I didn't like was the pacing. The film stood by a lot of road movie clichés in its first half, and I found many of the scenic driving shots to be lulls that impeded the story (as opposed to additions that helped it along). Also, the editing in the early going is rather jumpy, and the director pulls one of my least favourite tricks: starting a conversation, for instance, in a restaurant, then picking that conversation up where it left off in the car, already on the highway, as though the ten to fifteen minutes that have clearly passed have not. What, were the characters pondering it the whole time?

The ensemble cast does good work in some challeneging scenarios, particularly Huffman and Zegers, but the script and the direction cause the film to come up short. It didn't quite get where it was going... the second third of the film is a real powerhouse, but it doesn't save the stuttering first act or the suddenly-over finale. I'm worried that I'm being unnecessarily hard on this movie, but overall it just wasn't as hard-hitting (emotionally or "social-commentarily") as I expected it would be.