Review

Review Date: 29-January-06
Spoiler Rating: Medium
Juju Judgment: Just OK

Transamerica (2005)

When accepting her Golden Globe award two weeks ago, "Transamerica" star Felicity Huffman remarked that she "would like to salute the men and women who brave ostracism, alienation, and a life lived on the margins to become who they really are." She was presumably speaking of people like her character Bree Osbourne, who came into the world male and expends a considerable amount of time, money, and anxiety becoming female. Based largely on this comment, I went to "Transamerica" expecting to see some serious struggle and self-reflection by a character for whom gender is paramount to identity. (I was hoping to see this because transsexuality makes little sense to me.) But the film isn't particularly concerned with the issues that Huffman mentioned. It's more your average little indie trying to make a statement about life, and a middling one at that.

Instead of focusing on Bree's unusual situation, writer/director Duncan Tucker addresses the commonplace (and possibly related) themes of family and the search for belonging. As the film opens, Bree's preparation for her final operation is interrupted by the unexpected news that she fathered a son eighteen years ago. At the insistence of her shrink and only friend (Elizabeth Peña), she flies from LA to New York to bail the young man out of jail and point him in a respectable direction before returning to her independent life. This of course leads to that most hallowed gesture of self-exploration and most fertile opportunity for heart-to-heart bonding, the road trip. The highway is especially bumpy this time due to the fact that (a) Bree won't admit her true reason for taking the boy under her wing, and (b) the boy (Kevin Zegers) is a drug-happy prostitute with major problems of his own.

The early stages of the journey contain the movie's finest moments, as they allow the audience to comprehend Bree's touching and amusing idiosyncrasies, namely her primness, her learning, her vulnerability, and her compassion. Huffman and Zegers are likable and work well together; it's too bad they're brought down by an increasing number of forced incidents beginning with the purchase of an old beater for the trip (a lame attempt at drollery) and ending with a visit to Bree's family in Phoenix. There, the story gets bogged down in a mire of comedy and drama that goes a long way toward explaining why Bree has issues but detracts from the central relationship of a lonely parent reaching out to an equally lonely child.

The way to end ostracism is to reduce the ignorance and shock surrounding lifestyles that aren't mainstream, so I suppose making the heroine of "Transamerica" just another schmuck with family baggage has its usefulness. Yet at the same time, making "Transamerica" just another movie about messed-up moderns who need to heal through love and understanding diminishes the unique potential suggested by the title, the premise, and the pre-Oscar hullaballoo. I can follow Bree through her interpersonal conflicts but can't understand why she goes beyond the average sufferer by mutating her body and putting herself under the knife. A film that delved into that might be more worth watching and might have given Huffman real occasion to shine.

Copyright © 2006 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.