Family Outing
Felicity Huffman scores as transgendering man in 'Transamerica'

Bree Osborne wants an "innie," not an "outie," and we're not talking belly buttons. A biological man in the last stage of transgendering into a woman, she only has one last surgery—the big one—to go. But her plans stall a week before her surgery when she gets an unwelcome, phone call from the teenage son she never knew she had in Transamerica, Duncan Tucker's entertainingly oddball road movie of sexual identity and dysfunctional family relations.

Felicity Huffman (Lynette on Desperate Housewives) pulls off an amazing feat as Bree; an actress playing a man on the verge of becoming a woman, Huffman conveys the tentative quality of someone trying out a feminine physique, voice, and accessories for the first time. With the natural feminine contours of her face blunted wirh rough-textured pancake and strategically misapplied lipstick, Huffman's estrogen-popping Bree seems genuinely in a kind of limbo, tottering around on her wedgies in her ferociously girly pink and lavender wardrobe with spirited determination, but far less confidence than, say, your average drag queen. It's a technically impressive, droll, and touchingly heartfelt performance.

On the eve of her surgery in L. A., Bree gets a phone call for Stanley (her former self) from Toby, a street hustler in jail in New York City hoping the father he's never met will bail him out. To Bree's horror, her therapist (Elizabeth Peña) won't sign off on her surgery until she resolves the complication of Toby, the product of Stanley's only youthful sexual experience (which Bree considers "so tragically lesbian, I didn't think it counted").

Kevin Zegers is excellent as rough-edged, sexy, sullen, emotionally evasive Toby, who has nowhere to go. Passing herself off as a charitable church lady, Bree drives Toby to Kentucky, but a reunion with his stepfather proves disastrous. Although "not cut out to be a mother," Bree is disturbed enough by Toby's drug-taking and careless sexuality to want to do right by him, and so begins their odyssey through red-state America, sorting throught their various dreams and deceptions to find common ground.

There's a funny scene at raucous tranny party (the least convincing "female" turns out to be the biologically correct Mary Kay saleswoman). Graham Greene is charming as ever as a New Mexico rancher smitten with Bree. And Fionnula Flanagan is perfectly frightful as Bree's delusional harridan mother, whose emotional bludgeoning of Bree sparks a deeper empathy between Bree and Toby.

TRANSAMERICA With Felicity Huffman and Kevin Zegers. Written and directed by Duncan Tucker. (R) 110 minutes. (***)
Review published in Good Times, Feb. 16, 2006