Gloria Steinem, the Toledo native and pioneering feminist writer, famously said all women, on some level, are female impersonators. What that means for Transamerica - my brain continues to sputter, brighten, sputter.
Transamerica tells the story of a transsexual named Bree who, stay with me now, is a man about to undergo surgery that will make him a her. Complicating this is a delicate performance by Felicity Huffman, nominated for a best actress Oscar for the role.
She plays the he who wants to be a she but, since an actress is playing the he, Huffman must act like a man who wants to be a woman but who is too much a man to be entirely convincing as a woman. She conveys layers within the layers. If the Academy Awards partnered with the Winter Olympics, Huffman's degree of difficulty would be 11.6.
She'd take the gold.
And yet, hot on the heels of Brokeback Mountain and Imagine Me & You (also opening today) and Rent and Capote and Breakfast on Pluto and the rest of the recent films with gay themes, and recognizing transsexuals deserve a place in a big, diverse country, and admiring the transcendent performance of Huffman - there's got to be something progressive in society when a movie with all that gets to be as ordinary as any other.
For further reading on the subject, I gently urge you to glance at the Imagine Me & You review. Same deal, pretty much. In fact, because timing is forcing the comparison, Brokeback Mountain itself, though by no means ordinary, also takes its cues from old hoary models; in its case, the story of star-crossed lovers up against the odds, as old as Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood in Splendor in the Grass and every take on Romeo and Juliet ever produced. Details change. The rest doesn't.
If anything, Transamerica, directed by first-timer Duncan Tucker, doesn't simply draw to mind old movie formulas so much as it feels like yet another example of a remarkable performance elevating unremarkable storytelling.
The specifics of the role are almost beside the point. You remember the actor, and the acting, but somehow, less about the film. There's always a few come Oscar time; Walk the Line and Crash get this year's honors.
But Huffman's performance is something else entirely; it is the film, strong enough to cover up the mediocrity of the rest of the picture, complicated and showy without feeling complicated and somehow never looking showy. Charlize Theron's extraordinary turn in the otherwise pedestrian Monster is its best comparison.
Bree (short for Sabrina) - and once known as Stanley - is not exactly a transsexual (and she doesn't consider herself gay, either). She is more like nearly-transsexual, one surgery away from complete womanhood.
She's had cosmetic surgery and hormone treatment and even voice coaching. (For simplicity's sake, let's use female pronouns.) What's astonishing about Huffman's performance is not that she plays a man impersonating a woman but that she does this while suggesting the cracks in that facade. Huffman is playing a person learning to become a different person, to turn theater into a daily reality, all the while never losing sight of either one.
Tucker may be conventional and obvious with his plot but he knows to develop a person and not a type of person. Bree is not an exercise in camp or drag; Huffman, who recently won an Emmy for Desperate Housewives, gets her fill of camp on television. Bree, as she describes herself, goes "stealth."
If she is assembled from parts, most of them are conservative and prim. She says "perchance" a lot. When she discovers that she fathered a son and he's become a hustler in New York, the details are too unseemly for her.
Here is a man who believes his gender is a genetic mistake and overcompensates for his lack of femininity by wearing too much pink and too much makeup, by rarely swearing, and always speaking in a Blanche DuBois lilt.
Before she decides to fly to New York and rescue her son - she poses as a Christian missionary at the juvenile detention hall - she explains to her therapist the boy is a result of a "tragically lesbian" episode in college.
The rest you can spot miles away - quite literally, as Bree and son Toby (Kevin Zegers) then find themselves in one of those road-trip-Americana films, driving across country to return Toby to his stepfather, fighting over radio stations (of course), surrounded by general stores and acoustic guitars and meadows and a United States that only exists in movies like this.
One catch: Bree doesn't tell Toby she is his actual father. There are times you wonder if Tucker intentionally keeps the paternity secret just so Huffman can tell strangers, "I'm not his mother"- and it is a funny line. But it's hardly worth the cliches that dredge up in its wake, including the old (say it with me): It's not what you look like that counts but who you are inside.
Transamerica is a little too cute and prescribed, but Huffman doesn't allow it to slip into sentiment, and the closer Bree gets to her Arizona parents (who remember Stanley, not Bree) the more the melodrama hits notes of dark realizations. Bree's mother (Fionnula Flanagan) is an aging diva, heavily made-up and wearing pant suits, a caricature of a classy woman. You see Bree in her. And you see what Stanley rebelled against, too. And then, lastly, you see the child is the father to the man. Or something like that.
Contact Christopher Borrelli at: cborrelli@theblade.com
or 419-724-6117.
First Published February 24, 2006, 10:37 a.m.
