It is, as Jack Lemmon said in Some Like It Hot, a whole different sex. Felicity Huffman is best known as the Desperate Housewife with the three feisty little boys driving her to distraction. Now she has given a miraculously relaxed and witty performance as a man-to-woman pre-op transsexual who, after long periods of hormone treatment, facial reconstruction and voice therapy, is tensely waiting for her therapist to sign off on crucial permission to have the final surgery performed on her (hated) penis.
The character's name, confusingly for DH fans, is Bree - which turns out to be short for Sabrina. On the very eve of this procedure, Bree receives a phone call from someone asking for "Stanley", her old male identity. It is from a New York police station, asking if Bree will stand bail for a young man called Toby (Kevin Zegers) - taken in for prostitution - who is a son she fathered by a one-night stand 17 years ago. Bree's therapist says the surgery consents cannot be signed until she gets "closure" on this, so Bree is forced to travel to New York - posing as a Christian saver of lost souls - to get Toby out of jail, and travel with him cross-country to Los Angeles where her surgeon is waiting, all the time wondering if or when she should tell Toby the truth.
On paper, it sounds like a very contrived, mawkish and politically correct excuse for a road movie, and that title seems to be shrilly standing up for marginalised souls all across the US. But the film is an absolute delight, and Huffman is a treat. She has no sassiness, no attitude, no acid put-downs. No one susses her except an eight-year-old child, whose ingenuous questioning sends Bree sobbing out of a cafeteria. Haughtily, painfully, Bree carries her hard-won femininity through the gas-station forecourts and truck-stop rest-rooms like a Lalique vase in a gale. With her frumpy dresses and Jackie O sunglasses, Bree is a cut above David Walliams's "I'm a lady" character in Little Britain. She is more like a cross between Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie and Peter Cook's impression of Greta Garbo. And her voice, carefully modulated, has the tiniest touch of Marlee Matlin in Children of a Lesser God.
It is a strange experience watching a woman playing a man preparing to be a woman: maybe Elizabethan theatre audiences had a similar feeling watching boys playing women pretending to be boys. Huffman carries it off tremendously, though, and the only time when her on-screen presence is uncomfortable is when it is intended to be so: right at the start, when she is being grilled by a bored and hostile shrink. Her gaunt, almost equine face with its sharply defined chin and semi-visible stubble over the inevitable Adam's-apple-concealing neckscarf and the tremulous smile is almost unwatchable. "Would you describe yourself as a happy person?" asks the psychiatrist. "Yes," says Bree blandly. "No, wait - no." She will not be happy, she clarifies, until she has her procedure.
After fate flings the forgotten son at her, Bree is forever being put into situations where she must deal with various butch men on the road, encounters that put her into a glacially courteous, Blanche-DuBois-lite mode. She is still, to use transsexual terminology, "in stealth" - trying to pass for female in the outside world - but Toby's appearance in her life disrupts all her stealth strategies, inner and outer. He is an apparently straight young guy whose ambition is to star in gay porn, so Toby too would appear to have identity issues in the making.
Transamerica wins you round by declining to grandstand on sexual or political issues, by not banging any drum in Bree's cause, by not demanding victim status for Bree or making authentication of her new sexual identity a condition of finding her attractive or sympathetic. (Incidentally, an agnostic attitude on these issues is traditionally signalled by the journalist sticking to the transsexual's name and finding ingenious and supercilious ways of not using the male or female pronoun. I can't be bothered with it.)
Everything about Transamerica is fraught and complicated, yet writer/ director Duncan Tucker somehow creates from these intractable materials a very easy and even happy comedy. And he is helped by Felicity Huffman, giving one of the funniest, subtlest performances to be seen this year.