dvd of the week
Transamerica, one the best and most subversive movies about transgender issues ever made, starred Felicity Huffman as Bree in an epic performance that should have won her an Oscar in 2006. Bree is an anti-heroine – proud, angry, funny and dishonest. She is deeply flawed and secretly fragile. Without Huffman’s performance, Transamerica would just be a pretty good road movie. Bree is a week away from her sex-reassignment surgery when she gets a call from a kid in jail in New York who claims to be her son. Unaware that she even had a son, Bree flies from L.A., picks him up, tells him she’s a church-worker and drives him across the country. Her son Toby (Kevin Zegers) is screwed up – a hustler, a thief and a drug-user – and Bree does her best to help him fly straight, often ineffectively. Eventually, Toby discovers that Bree is both a transsexual and his father, but not before Bree is forced to deal with her own dysfunctional parents (an insane Fionnula Flanagan and an endearing Burt Young). Bree and Toby achieve their goals, but what they want is not what society wants of them. Rather, it is what will lead them to be happy, if only for a while. But they find each other and that solidarity is the film’s happy ending.
