Review of Transamerica (2005) by Markb. — 02 Feb 2006

A man seeking to become a woman--who dresses and acts like one, and who has had the hormone injections and most of the other necessary procedures--has his/her journey to the final operation interrupted by a sudden appearance by his long-lost son, a street hustler and would-be gay porn star who not only is completely unaware of their relationship but also doesn't know that "she's" still a "he".

You've definitely got to give writer-director Duncan Tucker his props for concocting a one-of-a-kind premise, but then you have to subtract points for making it just one more road movie. We've had hundreds and hundreds of them, from It Happened One Night to Easy Rider to Midnight Run to Rain Man; unless your name happens to be Alexander Payne, it's a really tired, overused genre that needs to be given at least a temporary rest, and did I mention that this is no It Happened One Night or Easy Rider or Midnight Run or Rain Man? TransAmerica strains to be light and airy, with only a few carefully calibrated heavy dramatic moments, but it falls short of the mark: the audience I saw this with laughed uproariously at the relatively few effectively comic moments mostly because there WERE relatively few of them.

As far as Felicity Huffman's much-vaunted tour de force, I must admit I'm on the fence; I generally really like Huffman, who was terrific on TV's Sports Night and whose overwhelmed executive-turned-mommy is my favorite Desperate Housewife, but here.

..I just don't know. I greatly admired Hilary Swank's work in Boys Don't Cry and Charlize Theron's in Monster, and Huffman's performance here is an impressive TECHNICAL achievement, but there have been just too many actresses lately who've won Oscars for doing the equivalent of Robert DeNiro's and Tom Hanks's radical physical makeovers in PORTIONS of Raging Bull and Cast away; it's flashy, to be sure, but this year at least I preferred the more subtle, sublime and non-nominated work of Shopgirl's Claire Danes, King Kong's Naomi Watts and The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio's Julianne Moore.

(And Huffman will probably edge Reese Witherspoon out on March 5 partially because voters will remember her endearing Emmy speech about William H. Macy kissing her in a cornfield and hope she repeats or does a variation on it.

Just ask Roberto Begnini how important previous awards-season acceptance-speech showmanship is!) Maybe my mixed feelings about Huffman are also due to Tucker's characterization of Stan/Bree as being rather stiff and humorless; in addition to "tucking it in", the surgeons need to do an additional operation to remove the stick from his/her butt! This, of course, is just one indication of the general coarseness with which Tucker treats some of his characters; it's nowhere more in evidence than when Stan/Bree and son make an extended stop to meet the family.

The sister, delightfully played by Carrie Preston, is so bright and engaging she deserves her own movie, and it's a real pleasure to see Burt Young, Rocky Balboa's screen brother-in-law, in really relaxed form as the dad, but the normally fine character actress Fionnula Flanagan is hopelessly saddled with the one-dimensionally caricatured role of Stan/Bree's buffoonish, intolerant mom.

One of the aspects of Brokeback Mountain that makes it great is its complex, utterly sympathetic treatment of all of Jack's and Ennis's family members; TransAmerica wants badly to look breezy and nonjudgmental, but everytime Flanagan appears onscreen or says something, the movie's as strident and hamfisted as the worst Norman Lear-produced sitcoms of the mid-1970s.