Lost In Transition

[January 18th, 2006] Felicity Huffman is not a man. It's important to keep that in mind while watching her in Transamerica, where she plays a pre-op transsexual man awaiting final gender reassignment so convincingly that you'll start to wonder what's under her skirt. But she is not a man. Felicity Huffman is just a damn good actress.

"There was a really short list of actresses I thought could play this," said Transamerica writer-director Duncan Tucker during a recent trip to Portland. "It was always going to be an actress, not a guy in a dress. I wanted to honor where the character was going and not mire her in what she left behind."

Huffman, in a performance that nabbed a Golden Globe Monday and will probably garner an Oscar nomination, stars in Tucker's wonderfully bittersweet film as Bree Osbourne, a person caught in a sexual limbo—not quite a complete woman, still partially a man—as he/she awaits the final surgical procedure needed to make the transformation complete. Just as Bree is about to undergo the final operation, he/she gets a call from Toby (Kevin Zegers), a teen boy looking for Stanley Osbourne. It turns out that before the hormone treatments started, Bree was Stanley. And during a "failed lesbian experiment" in college, Stanley fathered a child—the nearly 18-year-old Toby, now leading a troubled life as a hustler. Bree is reluctantly forced to deal with this unexpected surprise from her/his past, while keeping the truth from Toby.

"I joke that Transamerica is the Lord of the Rings of transsexual movies," says Tucker with a laugh. "Bree has to go on a journey to get rid of something she doesn't want, just as Frodo did. They are both in a way coming-of-age stories."

Bree's journey comes in the form of a cross-country road trip, where she/he and Toby gradually form a bond, and she/he wrestles with parental concerns and responsibility. Even relying on an age-old cinematic convention to convey personal growth and enlightenment, Tucker manages to keep Transamerica from degenerating into a jumbled mess of road-trip trappings. Instead, he infuses the film and his characters with quirky humanity that keeps them from becoming clichés and stereotypes—especially Bree, who is painted with finely detailed brushstrokes. In fact, it is the depth and complexity that Tucker and Huffman bring to Bree that give the film its heart and soul. Seldom are transgender characters treated with such cinematic respect that they're allowed to be more than comedic relief or a tragic subplot.

"I think the main thing that is subversive about this movie, if it is subversive at all, is the fact that the main character is a transsexual woman—but it's not a movie about transsexuality. It's like a sheep in wolf's clothing," explains Tucker. "It's a very sweet celebration of life."