Transamerica

Herald rating: * * * *

Drag acts in movies are usually, though not invariably, of lighthearted intent. The extraordinary, Oscar-nominated performance that sustains this touching and heartfelt road movie is of another order altogether.

For a start, it is not a simple drag act. Huffman's character Bree (short for Sabrina) is a genetic male named Stanley who is, at the film's opening, poised to take the drastic step of being surgically assigned the female gender she craves.

But because Huffman is a woman playing a man (who acts like and wants to become a woman) the film delivers us multi-layered Shakespearean ironies: Viola in Twelfth Night disguises herself as a man, Cesario, and a woman falls in love with her, but because women's roles were played by men, the original Viola was a man playing a woman playing a man.

Debutant director Tucker, who also wrote the intelligent screenplay, is keenly alive to the nuances. His story has Bree discovering a son, Toby (Zegers) whom she, as Stanley, fathered in her teenage years.

As she travels back with him to Los Angeles from New York, where she bailed him out of trouble, she hides the truth from him and pretends to be a Christian social worker. People they meet think they're mother and son. "I'm not his mother," Bree insists, and the significance of the remark is lost on everyone except us.

What makes Transamerica more than a soap with a twist is the determination of both Tucker and Huffman (Lynette in Desperate Housewives) to treat Bree as a character rather than a curiosity.

Her transsexuality is part of the story, but it's not the film's subject. And Tucker isn't campaigning for minority rights. Indeed, Bree is something of a pain in the arse, at once arch (she spikes her speech with French phrases and corrects Toby's grammar) and faintly priggish. But in a movie that is neither sentimental nor preachy, she never loses a radiantly specific humanity and even in the flat spots, we care about her.

A side-trip to her childhood home is an entertaining if rather predictable set-piece farce (in which Irish-born Flanagan shines as Stanley's heartbroken mother) while a subplot involving a Native American man (Greene) is typical of the film's inventiveness.

But it's in the rest of Huffman's generous and intelligent performance that she sets up the touching finale. She lifts an otherwise conventional film into something special. Recommended.

CAST: Felicity Huffman, Kevin Zegers, Fionnula Flanagan, Graham Greene, Burt Young
DIRECTOR: Duncan Tucker
RUNNING TIME: 103 minutes
RATING: R16, offensive language, drug use and sexual themes
SCREENING: RIALTO