Pictured Kevin Zegers and Felicity Huffman in Transamerica.
Two independent movies opening this week put the focus on two degrees of cross-gender identification: Breakfast on Pluto, the charmed tale of a cross-dressing glam rocker in Ireland, and Transamerica, in which the title character is a pre-op male-to-female transsexual. Both open this week and both are worth checking out.
Transamerica is the name of a financial/ insurance corporation that once owned United Artists and is now the awkward title for a movie about a female transsexual bonding with the gay teenage hustler son she's just found out she's fathered. If that's not confusing or delightful enough of a premise, imagine Web surfers looking for one and finding the other. Talk about eye openers. For Stanley 'Bree' Osbourne, the leading character in the movie is nothing if not an eye opener. Out gay writer-director of the movie Duncan Tucker ( making his feature debut ) , has handed Felicity Huffman one of those dream parts that comes along rarely in an actor's career. Huffman's performance, which has been winning awards at film festivals, is being touted as Oscar worthy. It is. It's also the best thing in this uneven picture that scores points for mining fresh insight within its classic road movie structure.
At the outset, the whip-smart but emotionally stunted Bree is living in L.A., working as a dishwasher and phone solicitor and eager to finalize her transition from male to female. But just before the surgical procedure Bree gets a phone call from Toby ( Kevin Zegers ) , a young man who claims to be her teenage son from a long-ago sexual encounter with his mother. Further, he's in detention for gay hustling on the streets of New York. Bree reveals the phone call to her sympathetic but tough therapist Margaret ( Elizabeth Peña ) , who insists that she must come to terms with her son before she can sign the papers authorizing the operation. Reluctantly, Bree heads to New York to tentatively attempt a reconciliation with the son she has never known.
It sounds like the plot for a Lifetime Television for Women movie, and, honestly, without Huffman's stellar work, that's pretty much what Transamerica is. But as the film morphs into a '70s-style road picture like Harry and Tonto or Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, during which the two travel back across the country toward L.A., it also delves into layers of sexual ambiguity that are fascinating. Toby thinks that Bree is a nice church lady who's come to take him home to meet his dad. Bree just seems to be making it up as they go, desperate to keep her true identity secret and, of course, wanting acceptance at the same time. For a street hustler, Toby seems awfully naïve ( the fact that he doesn't instantly pick up that Bree is a transsexual is a tad unbelievable ) , but the device allows him ( and us ) time to get a fix on Bree's uptight character and a chance for her to slowly peel away the emotional layers ( and eventually some of the ultra-feminine clothes she wears like armor ) . Along the way there are charming road montages, chance encounters with characters both pleasant and eccentric, and finally a penultimate segment with Bree's overbearing family ( dominated by her mother—played with relish by Fionnula Flanagan ) .
Huffman's complex characterization is greatly aided by the makeup and costume design. She has been photographed to emphasize her masculine features, broad shoulders and large hands and is purposely over made up ( she's like a younger version of Baby Jane Hudson ) . To that Huffman has added a carefully considered baritone almost devoid of emotion. This is a character who closely watches her words. It's a voice far from that of Lynette Scavo, the familiar voice we know from Desperate Housewives. As Bree moves toward emotional emancipation the voice subtly, naturally changes ( as do the makeup and clothes ) , and by the end I believed that Bree was finally comfortable in her ( literally ) new skin.
Would Transamerica have been as powerful with a transgendered actress in the role of Bree? Yes, but in a different way. Part of the amazement of Huffman's performance is our awareness of the difference between the 'real life' actress and her onscreen transformation. It's the kind of thing actors love to do and audiences love to applaud ( Dustin Hoffman in Rain Main and Charlize Theron in Monster both got Oscars this way ) . Put a real transsexual in the part and suddenly the gimmicky aspects are removed. A professional transsexual actress with the kind of talent that the no-holds-barred Huffman shows could have worked ( though without a modicum of name recognition no one would have financed it ) . Without a professional, it's a huge mistake—not unlike the one Clint Eastwood made when he cast the real drag queen Lady Chablis and not an actress in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. It was Tucker's good fortune to have gotten an actress so willing to immerse herself so completely in the part. It's a mighty impressive parlor trick.
Another mighty impressive performance is given by Cillian Murphy, the Irish actor with the piercing blue eyes, in Neil Jordan's Breakfast on Pluto. Heretofore known mainly as the pale villain in Batman Begins, Murphy's work here is extraordinary. Murphy plays Patrick 'Kitten' Braden, the Irish orphan from the tiny village who comes of age in the swinging London of the late '60s and early '70s. Kitten leads a spectacular fantasy life and falls into one adventure after another ( separated into Dickens-like vignettes with title cards ) as he seeks to find the pretty lady with the blonde hair—the mother who gave him up for adoption.
Based on the Pat McCabe novel, Kitten's delusions ( they serve as instinctive survival tactics for the character ) are so intense that nothing else seems to filter through—not her grim circumstances, not the grittiness around her, and certainly not the constant 'interruptions' by those pesky IRA terrorists with their machine guns and bombs. No one has a more fabulous fantasy life than lonely misfit gay boys, it seems, and Jordan holds true to Kitten's steel-under-velvet determination to let nothing knock off her rose-colored glasses. Murphy is helped by a richly talented supporting cast that includes Liam Neeson, Brendan Gleeson ( as always ) , and especially Gavin Friday as a love-struck Elvis wannabe.
Breakfast on Pluto examines a turbulent time in Irish history filtered through Kitten's refusal to live in reality, which at times makes the movie more palatable and perhaps more insignificant, but never boring. I quite liked it.
