Last week in these pages, Nodi Murphy, director of the Out in Africa Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, pointed out that this year’s festival has a special focus on ”intersex issues” and transgendered people. So it’s appropriate that Transamerica opens this week, while the festival is still running, though it’s not on the festival itself. Presumably that’s because Transamerica is released by Nu Metro and the Out in Africa festival is in bed, so to speak, with Ster-Kinekor. Still, it’s good timing for this enjoyable and touching movie about a male-to-female transsexual.
He used to be Stanley, but she is now Sabrina, or Bree for short. She is living as a woman and is on the brink of her final operation. Her psychologist has just signed the necessary papers but, days before Bree can go for the op, she finds out that a very brief, youthful heterosexual (or lesbian, as she describes it) liaison has left her with a son, who is now in jail. She goes off to find him and, naturally, this gives rise to all sorts of complications — the kind of thing Pedro Almodóvar would dispense with in 10 minutes, but Transamerica is a gentle character piece rather than a knotty melodrama.
Written and directed by Duncan Tucker, Transamerica takes the form of a road movie. This is a time-honoured way of using a journey across the vast American landscape to mirror an inner journey. The title thus refers not to the large corporation that used to own the great movie studio United Artists, but to that cross-country odyssey — and of course to Bree’s transitional gender status.
Desperate Housewives‘s Felicity Huffman plays Bree, and what a joy she is to behold. One had only subliminally noticed her slight mannishness in the TV series, but now she plays upon it. Ironically, though, it emerges most strongly when Bree is doing all she can to be as ladylike as possible, which inevitably shows up as a desperately sincere parody of femininity. In this, we are reminded of the ways in which femininity is a social construction that may or may not comfortably overlap with biological gender. Obviously Bree feels she is meant to be a woman, but still she has to work hard at looking, walking and talking like one. As even women sometimes do.
Watching the movie, one mentally compares Bree to other transsexuals on film, especially Terence Stamp’s turn in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. By contrast with Bree, it was clear that Stamp’s character was basically a gay man with a big drag fetish who had gone all the way to physical womanhood. There wasn’t that much in his performance to distinguish him from the cross-dressing gay men around him who, one assumes, still had all their dangly bits attached.
Huffman’s Bree is an entirely other kind of creature. She is certainly not a flamboyant exhibitionist. And she may be a woman trapped in a man’s body, but this is not about sexual orientation or preference as such. There is no whiff of sexuality coming off Bree — she seems to have damped down her lusts entirely, if she ever had any. She comes across as a truly androgynous figure and very convincingly ”intersexed”.
Huffman manages this complex balancing act very well indeed, and the way her face registers the contradictory and confusing emotions Bree goes through (often simultaneously) is simply marvellous. Huffman surely deserved the best-actress Oscar that went to Reese Witherspoon for her June Carter in Walk the Line.
Not that Witherspoon didn’t make a convincing job of an under-written and under-motivated role (why did she refuse to marry Johnny Cash for so long?). But one does feel that Witherspoon was mostly playing her feisty self in country-and-western drag, while Huffman’s performance in Transamerica is one that can’t have come easy; it’s a huge challenge to which she rises triumphantly.
If Transamerica feels a little drab and down-home in some ways, that’s partly because of its low budget — and we’re used to all the gloss and style of big-budget cinematography and so forth. But it’s also because of its earthy, matter-of-fact quality, and the basic, ordinary human problems highlighted in the rather non-ordinary family issues Bree has to deal with.
Huffman’s superb central performance is balanced by Kevin Zegers as her truculent teenage son, on the one side, and, on the other, by such figures as Bree’s own rather scary mother (Fionnula Flanagan).
All together, they make Transamerica a delight.