I am who I choose to be

Transamerica – Duncan Tucker

There is an extraordinary, perhaps unique moment late on in Duncan Tucker’s Transamerica. Felicity Huffman’s transsexual Stan/ ‘Bree’ has finally had the radical gender-reassignment surgery he/she has longed for all his/her life. The week-long deferment of this operation is the dramatic space in which this fascinating, most unusual film takes place. At the last minute, Bree’s psychiatrist withholds her legally required approval for the literally life-changing surgery when Bree discovers that as Stan, her brief heterosexual affair 17 years before produced a son who is now in police custody and trying to contact his ‘father’ for help. With me so far? It gets better.

Having collected Toby from the police, Bree undertakes a road trip to her surgical destiny in California. Bree at first lies then eventually reveals to him her confused and confusing life and ambiguous sexuality after inadvertently revealing the anatomical basis of it courtesy of an emergency al fresco pee by the road side and an unfortunately placed wing mirror. The journey of self-discovery that lies at the heart of the film then becomes shared, but makes her impossibly chaotic sense of personal and gender identity, even more fragile.

In an outwardly camp but inwardly subtle performance that inevitably has to build credibility cumulatively for her unique character, Huffman gradually strips away our stereotypical assumptions – sexual, emotional and personal. In a shallow culture often over-indulgent towards the over-used excuse of victimhood, we find we have finally encountered a real victim. For we have met a sensitive, caring, self-deprecatingly funny human being who is mocked by and for, nothing less than her own body. A victim of biology. Even God one feels, mocks Bree and people like her, so bizarre are the contradictions between her body and her feelings. And a society so disturbed by the confusion this generates that it has no ground rules to cope with it, as usual, stigmatises, mocks, pillories and rejects anything it doesn’t understand, especially when to do with sex, gender and emotion.

So to the moment with which I began. Huffman, now by all outward standards, fully Bree and female for the first time, has lost those few stable reference points that drove her to the surgeon’s knife. Yes hormonally and emotionally, she feels female, and her body for the first time does not contradict those instincts. Yet her genuine feelings for her son, while feminine in sensibility, are empirically, in fact and necessity, those of an initially biological man. Bree, not surprisingly, is at the centre of a maelstrom of conflicting feelings and responsibilities. Even her hard won certainty of the need for full gender-reassignment, itself derived from fierce rejection of part of her own physical being, has been undermined by the shock of unexpected parenthood and the lack of any moral reference points from which her responsibilities can be derived.

In this extraordinary and very moving scene, all of these conflicts come out. Huffman’s playing somehow reveals all of the contradictions. The uniqueness of the moment is that we too are so lost in unknown emotional territory, all the usual gender signals so crossed and contradictory, that one has to respond to this palpable distress as simply human, in a sense without gender. Huffman, I’m not sure how, manages to be both male and female and as this doesn’t really ‘compute’, one’s mind sort of drops the issue from consciousness. Maybe I’m being fanciful, maybe it’s just me, but this otherwise simply entertaining, comedy of gender manners and laconic self-mockery, suddenly achieves a moment of powerful cinematic uniqueness.

Enough of the heavy stuff. Transamerica is at times uneven, intentionally discomforting, even vulgar, but it is also deliciously funny and oddly affecting. The scenes with Bree’s grotesquely dysfunctional family are a joy. Her cloying, treacly blue rinse Christian mother gives both heterosexuality and maternalism a bad name and incessantly complains to her Jewish husband (Burt Young) who plays like a cross between Bob Hoskins and Syd James. Stir in an ex-drunk, rebellious sister called Sydney and we seem trapped in a dramatic hinterland somewhere between Monty Python and La Cage Au Folles. Ken Zeggers as Bree’s son Toby, wanders through the action looking totally, but appropriately bemused, whether trying to psych himself up to a re-erection on a porn movie shoot, or paddling innocently in the swimming pool with an inflatable dolphin lovingly provided by a Grandma who seems oblivious to that fact that his 10th birthday left town a few years back.

Transamerica both invites us to mock guiltily from the safe haven of stereotypical attitudes and indulge in some coarse and unkind laughter. And yet, and yet, Huffman makes Bree a real, vulnerable and likeable human being, struggling to cope with problems so contradictory and bizarre as to be inherently comic. In another perfect set of crossed wires, she refuses to be defined by her sexuality – whatever that is – yet cultivates and cherishes those soft and gentle behavioural characteristics, once innocently called ‘feminine’ but which every modern woman from 9 to 90 has for years been systematically eradicating from the face of the earth and the mind of man.

Transamerica is a bit like watching someone hurt herself badly by slipping on a banana skin and feeling truly alarmed at her painful injuries yet still shaking with irresistible laughter. Reflecting the film’s own contradictions – this is perhaps both a comic tragedy and a tragic comedy. A very satisfying one-off.

Filed under: 4 stars, Comedy, Drama, Duncan Tucker, General, Hollywood, Philosophical