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Partners
TransamericaIt's a week before the final operation that will complete her transformation into a woman, and California transsexual Stanley Osborne (Felicity Huffman) - who prefers to be known as Bree - is convinced that her entire life has been leading up to this moment. The last thing she wants, then, is a sudden phone call from New York informing her of the arrest of a son she wasn't aware even existed. At first, Bree is happy to ignore this reminder of her one and only sexual experience as a man, but then her therapist, realising she needs to resolve her feelings about being a parent, refuses to approve her for surgery until she has gone to New York and faced her child.
Unwillingly heading to the East Coast, Bree discovers her child is now a teenage hustler named Toby (Kevin Zegers) with a moderate drug problem, and instead of revealing the truth, ends up masquerading as a missionary and tries to help Toby out of a sense of guilt. Her initial idea is to return him to his foster parent as quickly as possible, but when this plan turns disastrous, the pair end up embarking on a bizarre cross country journey, with Bree trying to get home in time for her operation, and Toby aiming for life in Hollywood as a gay porn star.
Sadly, while Bree is a fascinating character, and Huffman delivers an excellent central performance, this haphazard road movie tries too hard to put across the script's ideas about family, sexuality and gender. The end result wants to be a thought-provoking look at how we are defined by other people's perceptions and our perceptions of ourselves. But more often, it settles for playing up the lurid sitcom humour, particularly when Bree attempts to borrow money from her parents and is dragged into a tremendously awkward family reunion. All along, the film functions as a series of loosely connected sketches rather than a coherent dramatic whole, with overly kooky characters (like the vegan Peyote shaman who steals Bree's car) seemingly thrown in just to heighten the offbeat mood.
It's not as if there isn't enough dramatic meat at the centre of the movie, with the relationship between Toby and Bree evolving in a fascinatingly bizarre manner and touching on some adventurous ground. However, these efforts are hampered by the script's over-the-top contrivances, and the fact that Toby often seems to function more as an overly convenient plot device than as a fully-realised and believable character.
Zegers' somewhat unsympathetic portrait of Toby doesn't help, and the chemistry between him and Huffman is unexpectedly overshadowed by the tentative near-romance between Bree and a cowboy hat-wearing Native American (Greene). This relationship, one of the major points along Bree's emotional journey, is beautifully played by both performers, although it does end up bearing a massive (yet presumably unintentional) resemblance to one of the subplots from gender-bending 1982 comedy Tootsie.
However messy the film may be along the way, Huffman's central turn is still a magnificent piece of acting which skilfully manages to avoid caricature, charting Bree's slow transformation from the vaguely artificial creature at the beginning of the movie into the person she's truly supposed to be. Huffman may sport a prosthetic penis in a couple of scenes that are seemingly designed for shock value, but in all other respects, her performance is deliciously subtle, using body language to emphasise the male aspects that Bree hasn't been able to completely eradicate. Engaging, quirky and thoroughly compelling, Huffman is sensational - it's just a pity the rest of the film doesn't hit similar heights.
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