Felicity's Star Turn In 'Transamerica'

November 26th, 2006 at 08:16am Michael Conniff 2

So you're sitting there with you Net Flix list and you are drawing a blank. Welcome to the real world of unlimited opportunity, where there's no accounting for the shortfall of righteous information at the moment of truth.

But we've got a good one for you, a flick that stars a graduate of Aspen High School now starring in one of the top shows on television. Starring Felicity Huffman and executive produced by her husband, William H. Macy, "Transamerica" renders America transparent to the sexual hypocrisy that a free society can't live without.

"Transamerica" is really just a typical road movie, if a woman one week away from final climcatic sex-change surgery bailing out the son-prostitute she didn't know she had is typical. The plot twists by writer-director Duncan Tucker are rickety at times because the timing of the premise is so suspect. There's more than a flicker of suspicion when father-mother and son, played with softening ferocity by Kevin Zengers, are dropped off just steps away from Bree's parents. And the way Bree's operation conincides with the revelation of a son is implausible at best.

But no matter. "Transamerica" is a movie about people, not sub-plots. Huffman, the star of "Desperate Housewives," is beyond desperate in a role that forces her to subsume any vestige of the natural sexuality so in evidence on the late, great "Sports Night." Her mannerisms--and the word is apt--have to be learned the way a middle-aged man once named Stanley might come to know them after a life in hell. It's hard to understand how Huffman lost out to Reed Witherspoon in "Walk The Line" on Oscar night. Her turn as a man literally becoming a woman is more a visitation than an performace, an act of humanity that ascends to the humane.

No need to go blank any more. Rent "Transamerica" starring Felicity Huffman if you want to see a man--and a woman-- transformed.

Entry Filed under: Movies, Politics, Aspen, Colorado, People, Stars, Women, Emma