Sex and Comedy
Transamerica
Who would expect Transamerica-a film about a person who gets stymied just before undergoing sexual-reassignment surgery-to be a comedy? But it has to be. When dour, methodical Stanley/Bree is hit with the news that he has a son he never met, it amounts to a hilarious, life-changing "oops!" This kind of material might customarily be given over to doomy gender politics like the preachy and weepy Boys Don't Cry. Luckily, Transamerica defies p.c. sanctimony. As S/B thinks back on his one-time heterosexual liaison, he laments, "The whole thing was so pathetically lesbian." From that pseudo-tragic, self-deprecating admission, Transamerica becomes the most original American movie comedy this year.
S/B, the film's transgendered protagonist, may seem both divisive and empathetic because he freakily-scarily-embodies the public and private tensions that are apparent in contemporary American life. But since Transamerica is not issue-oriented, S/B's personal predicament makes him the most challenging movie human since Evan Rachel Wood as the privileged brat in Marcos Siega's Pretty Persuasion. Like that uncanny but little-seen satire, Transamerica suggests a new left-field (as opposed to left-wing) breed of films that examine social maladjustment without the usual pieties. S/B's discomfort with his male body (diagnosed as "gender dysphoria") pushes him to lengths that signify a larger-and funny-cultural disorientation. Popping pills, he sings "You take some hormones / And I'll take some hormones / And I'll be a woman before ya!" Yet every gag in this movie is righteously poignant (such as S/B having pasted near his makeup mirror a photo of an African tribesperson wearing rows of disfiguring, distending neck bands).
When S/B walks out of his bungalow in L.A.'s barrio, having sequestered himself from the disapproving eye of the First World, he's dressed in excessively feminine pinks and lavenders and a wide-brimmed hat. A shy adventurer hiding his sexuality becomes a comic foil to his own delusions. This public spectacle ("living stealth") is steadily complicated through the actress Felicity Huffman's scrupulous characterization. What the Wayans brothers in White Chicks didn't understand about women (and so played broadly), Huffman knows about men. Her S/B is amusing precisely because she tracks his unsatisfied male desperation. Huffman plays pathos for comedy; when S/B moonlights as a telemarketer, the exaggerated primness recalls Lily Tomlin's haughty telephone operator Ernestine. Yet S/B's officious façade is easily shaken. When confessing a suicide attempt, she smiles at her own irony ("I dialed showing an intact sense of camp"). The laughter Huffman elicits is never cruel but arises from our sudden, deep apprehension of another being's feelings.
Turning a drag act into an act of empathy, Transamerica's writer-director Duncan Tucker avoids all campy clichés. Similar to what Neil Jordan showed in The Crying Game, his characters' actions have political resonance. S/B is always ladylike, but underneath the scarves and refined diction is a well-educated but defensive searcher. When S/B's psychologist insists that he go east to meet his son, the cross-country journey back to California enlarges the film. Several parent-child connections gets made. The first is under the comic ruse that S/B is a church missionary charitably offering to help teenage Toby (Kevin Zegers), a street hustler and drug dealer. Next they travel to Toby's stepfather in Kentucky, then to S/B's own parents and sister in Arizona.
S/B wants to be a woman but not a mother; he's naïve about the world, as Toby is about people-and neither person relates to gayness as a presumed identity. But Transamerica's assorted characters illustrate the work (and fumbling) that goes into achieving self, creating family and making nation. Tucker uses the road-movie genre for a nonjudgmental exploration of American experience-refuting Don Roos' snarkiness about family and sexuality. The road-movie concept also served Jim Jarmusch's Broken Flowers, where the series of male-female reunions suspiciously recalled Vincent Gallo's confessional road movie The Brown Bunny. All these broken family films are about cultural heartache, but Transamerica has a credible sense of what makes Americans complex. As the classic American road movie must, Transamerica observes surface dissension then realizes the need for reconciliation.
The theme song that accompanies S/B and Toby's road trip ("Lord take away these chains from me") defies the usual indie film pessimism by relating S/B's spiritual quest to an evocation of genuine American culture. The trucker's cap Toby buys to tease S/B's conservatism bears a motto (I'M PROUD TO BE A CHRISTIAN) that is not just a joke but symbolizes the difficulty of her self-acceptance. At a meeting with a group of other "stealth" people and a rendezvous with Native American Graham Greene, who revives S/B's knowledge about "matrilineal kinship systems," Tucker shows a large appreciation of sexes and ethnicities. But instead of moralizing, the film's culture clashes get funnier. Transamerica has the rough texture of a film that improvises its way through complex emotional territory. It's not slick like Wedding Crashers and The 40-Year-Old Virgin but unlike them, it has unexpectedly rich payoffs. When flirty-eyed Toby misinterprets S/B's kindness and makes a pass, it is a sexual mess but the explosion of conservative and liberal anxieties, secrets and lies, leads to clarity and empathy.
Neil Jordan's Breakfast on Pluto could be a British-set but fantastic version of Transamerica. Jordan's visual flair (Tucker's style is closer to the admirable naturalism of Loggerheads and Junebug) expresses a similar optimistic humanism that only dullards could fail to appreciate. Pluto's cross-dressing epic spotlights Patrick "Kitten" Braden (played by Cillian Murphy), an Irish orphan whose convoluted search for his parents deepens his soul connection to a country ravaged by political strife. It is a saga so wild and surrealistically vivid that Jordan makes you blink-and rethink-throughout.
Bursting with cultural references, the most monumental is a Last Tango in Paris billboard that makes Kitten sigh, "Marlon, my dream Brando." Breakfast on Pluto evokes the pandemonium and euphoria of late-'60s/early-'70s pop experience that Todd Haynes' Velvet Goldmine fucked up. Haynes pompously linked glam rock to Citizen Kane, while Jordan exudes genuine pop-art passion. Thus, the perfect vehicle for Bryan Ferry's long-awaited movie debut; he seduces Kitten with a sinister romantic tongue: "If you cried, I'd make you stop." Gavin Friday plays Kitten's first lover, a bisexual pub-rocker who seduces Kitten to Bobby Goldsboro's kitsch-classic "Honey" (transformed into an anthem for all whose lack of satisfaction makes them feel queer). These seductions loosen Kitten's desires while also charting shifts in pop and social styles. A disco epiphany rips Kitten's heart but his faith in love remains devout.
No filmmaker has used pop music this religiously. Jordan confirms the connection between cultural, spiritual and political experience. Murphy's Kitten suggests a drag imitation of a supermodel (the Jerry Hall of Roxy Music's Siren album cover?). He, too, has flirtatious eyes but his daydreaming optimism sometimes seem dangerously anarchic. Like S/B, Kitten heroically disrupts the social norm. For pop devotees, she is, at last, the cinematic realization of "Madame George," Van Morrison's ode to a mythic ambisexual saint ("The love that loves to love the love that loves"). The influence of Morrison's 1968 masterpiece Astral Weeks (several songs from which are heard in the film) deepens Pluto's greatness.