Transamerica (The Weinstein Company/IFC Films, R)

It’s hard to imagine any of the other desperate housewives doing what Huffman does here.

One of the big studio releases that found its way into the St. Louis International Film Festival last year was Duncan Tucker’s Transamerica, a film about a male-to-female, pre-operative transsexual who finds out she fathered a son who is now a teenager. Transamerica pretty much feels like the type of film one would see in a film festival and that would never get much of a release, save two factors: (1) the lead transsexual, Bree, is played by Desperate Housewives’ Felicity Huffman, and (2) she is getting (deserved) Oscar buzz for the role.

When Bree learns of her son Toby (Kevin Zegers) after his arrest from hustling, she goes to New York to bail him out of jail. The film then follows Bree driving back to her West Coast home in a rickety station wagon with him in tow, bonding with her long-lost son. They meet a bunch of colorful characters along the way, including a party of transsexuals, Graham Greene, and Bree’s unpleasant parents (who are quite ecstatic at the prospect of having a grandson). In both these subplots and the main barriers the characters face in the film, everything works out more or less how everyone in the audience expects it will. The film was shot very unartfully on Super-16 film, with the production design and cinematography about on the level of a Kevin Smith film. In Smith’s case, this aesthetic actually suits his work; it does not suit Transamerica.

What this means for Transamerica is that its only saving grace is the presence and performance of Huffman—but it certainly is a good one. The script asks a lot of her—full-frontal nude scenes with both a penis and a vagina, emoting all over the place, talking in a deep voice, looking awful, etc.—and she handles all of it very gracefully and even a little charismatically (it’s hard to imagine any of the other desperate housewives doing what she does here). One just has to wish that she had had a better showcase for her talents, as the film itself certainly does not justify all of the praise it is going to get on account of her work.