Movie Of The Week
Sydney Morning Herald
Monday January 5, 2009
Transamerica (2005) SBS, 10pm
A road movie with numerous detours into unlikely situations - en route from New York to LA - delivers unusual and sensitive entertainment when Sabrina "Bree" Osbourne, a pre-operative transsexual, finds her immediate future impeded by her long-term past.Bree (Felicity Huffman) was born male but has, for most of her life, lived as a woman and is on the verge of undertaking the surgery that will commit her to the destiny denied her by fate.When she gets a call advising that a 17-year-old kid in a New York juvenile detention centre has nominated Stanley Osbourne - her former identity - as his father, Bree panics and rushes to her analyst, Margaret, who insists that unless her past is sorted out, she won't sign the final consent form to approve the long-awaited surgery.Stanley did, it seems, have one heterosexual encounter during his college years but, as Bree tells Margaret: "It was so tragically lesbian I didn't think it counted."It did and it does - so much so that the conservatively disposed Bree flies to New York and bails out the teenager, Toby (Kevin Zegers), a midnight cowboy hustler with porn-star visions of fame. Posing as a Christian missionary specialising in rescuing runaway youngsters, Bree doesn't reveal her parental status or transsexuality, hoping to square things in the most expeditious fashion to enable the life-changing procedure to occur. There's a long queue for gender reassignment surgery and years of working two jobs to consider.Not surprisingly the cross-country trip has many twists and turns as Bree wrestles with notions of maternal-paternal support and discovers the kid's family - on his mother's side - almost as dysfunctional and brutally judgmental as her own.Changing gender, species or anything else wouldn't be too great a price to pay to escape these cringing Middle American minds - closed watertight against reality, change and difference. That Bree's sister, Sydney, is a recovering but unrepentant junkie speaks reams.Huffman's characterisation is rich with apprehensive pride, resilience, sincerity and gravity, allowing offbeat humour its due in situations ripe for over-exploitation or the kind of sentimental affirmation evident in, say, Philadelphia (1993).Like her young co-star Zegers, the Desperate Housewives star plays it straight - if that's an apt term in the circumstances.This is a film less about sexual orientation than about family, tolerance and the power of maternal instincts.
© 2009 Sydney Morning Herald
