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USA 2005
Directed by
Duncan Tucker
104 minutes
Rated M

Reviewed by
Andrea Buck
4 stars

TransAMERICA

Synopsis: A transsexual man (Bree, played by Felicity Huffman), on the brink of her gender re-assignment surgery to complete her journey to becoming a woman, is thrown off course when she receives a phone call from Toby (Kevin Zegers) , a young man claiming to be her/his son. She is forced by her psychiatrist to meet the boy and confront her past which she has been vehemently denying, before her doctor will consent to the desperately wanted surgery.

TransAMERICA is a complex, sophisticated, mature, evocative, humorous and confronting film with a plot that keeps rolling along, across the great American continent whilst also diving deep beneath the surface and into the souls of its characters, cruising adeptly into the terrain of human relations, including family bonds (with ample dysfunctionality) and socio-social conditions and occasionally glimpsing the peaks of the spiritual realm.

Bree is played brilliantly by Felicity Huffman, a woman playing a man-passing-as-a-woman. She so convincingly has us believing that, though she thinks she passes as a woman, we can clearly see she is not, and hence feel quite sorry for her. She’s amazing!

This film is not just about gender dysphoria, however. It is as much about honesty and acceptance on a broader level, a theme which is explored through the development of the difficult relationship between father and son and still further through the estrangement from and then re-unification with Bree’s parents, Elizabeth and Murray (Fionnula Flanagan and Burt Young) and sister (Carrie Preston). Grandma fumbles desperately to ‘keep’ Toby, it seems, as a replacement for her lost son in a plot detour which is a lot of fun.

As well as being gorgeous to look at, Kevin Zegers displays wonderful talent as Toby, the drug-taking, sexually promiscuous young man, trying to find his own identity and place in the world. Faced with his only son who has been playing dangerously with his own sexuality and expressions of masculinity, Bree is unable to face the truth that by having fathered a son, she must have once been a ‘he’. She thus poses as the conservative representative of an evangelical church (which she does very well) and in this guise agrees to drive Toby across America to L.A where he intends to pursue a career in porn movies.

This might read like a stereotypical plot designed for the portrayal of transgender characters, often depicted on screen as aberrant, but it is not so here. This film instead uses socially-frowned-upon sexual behaviour to challenge our notion of acceptance and unconditional love.It successfully pushes our boundaries without resorting to sensation or exploitation and ib this respect, particularly for a film emanating from America, is quite brave. We see Bree, desperate to relieve herself along the road, exposing her penis, full-frontal. So does Toby. More shocking for Toby than his discovery that Bree is a man, is the discovery that Bree is his father. What makes it even more of a shock is that Bree is driven to tell the truth only after Toby makes sexual advances on her..

TransAMERICA manages to cover all bases in terms of explanation of what it means, and feels like, to be transgender, mostly without irksome-feeling exposition, though sometimes with a little obviously-placed direction. Bree’s line, “I feel like a medieval heretic impaled on a large stake – with splinters”, is a blunt expression of the physical pain of having your penis turned outside-in to make a vagina, but as an example of this film’s complexity, this is not the only pain felt by the tortured post-op Bree. The deeper pain is felt for the loss of her son.

Overall, this is a film with humour,and heart.

 

 

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