9/19/2023 0 Comments Pandemonium movie gallo![]() ![]() 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. 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. As the classic American road movie must, Transamerica observes surface dissension then realizes the need for reconciliation. All these broken family films are about cultural heartache, but Transamerica has a credible sense of what makes Americans complex. 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. Tucker uses the road-movie genre for a nonjudgmental exploration of American experience-refuting Don Roos' snarkiness about family and sexuality. But Transamerica's assorted characters illustrate the work (and fumbling) that goes into achieving self, creating family and making nation. 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. ![]() Next they travel to Toby's stepfather in Kentucky, then to S/B's own parents and sister in Arizona. 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. Several parent-child connections gets made. When S/B's psychologist insists that he go east to meet his son, the cross-country journey back to California enlarges the film. S/B is always ladylike, but underneath the scarves and refined diction is a well-educated but defensive searcher. Similar to what Neil Jordan showed in The Crying Game, his characters' actions have political resonance. Turning a drag act into an act of empathy, Transamerica's writer-director Duncan Tucker avoids all campy clichés. The laughter Huffman elicits is never cruel but arises from our sudden, deep apprehension of another being's feelings. When confessing a suicide attempt, she smiles at her own irony ("I dialed showing an intact sense of camp"). ![]() Yet S/B's officious façade is easily shaken. ![]() Huffman plays pathos for comedy when S/B moonlights as a telemarketer, the exaggerated primness recalls Lily Tomlin's haughty telephone operator Ernestine. Her S/B is amusing precisely because she tracks his unsatisfied male desperation. What the Wayans brothers in White Chicks didn't understand about women (and so played broadly), Huffman knows about men. This public spectacle ("living stealth") is steadily complicated through the actress Felicity Huffman's scrupulous characterization. A shy adventurer hiding his sexuality becomes a comic foil to his own delusions. 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. 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). S/B's discomfort with his male body (diagnosed as "gender dysphoria") pushes him to lengths that signify a larger-and funny-cultural disorientation. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. ![]()
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