film for that line alone: it is a piece of human business that will stay with me long after many of the season’s films have passed from my mind.
And what else? Well, like Lolita, Transamerica spends much of its time on the road traveling from East Coast to West in a beat-up car, passing tourist joints and freshwater lakes and pausing in roadside bars and motels. Two people who don’t much like each other in New York get closer in Kentucky and learn to love each other in L.A. That one of these people is a pre-op male-to-female transsexual and the other is her son does not, in and of itself, rescue this film from an intense overfamiliarity. To watch this film go through its paces is a reminder that all cultures, no matter how alternative, petrify into cliché in the end. Part of this is in their desire for mainstream affirmation, which requires that they develop a “line” about their “issue” and not deviate from it.
From this film we divine that the present line on transgendered people is that they have a genetic disorder and not a psychological one, and therefore neither the script nor the audience is allowed even momentarily to consider the possibility that the operation Bree (Felicity Huffman) is about to undertake is anything other than a necessary and correct procedure. Nor are we allowed to wonder why, if transsexuality is (as a character puts it) “a radically evolved state of being,” Bree wants to take this radical male/female double-ness and reduce it into a singularity. What if the “problem” is neither genetic nor psychological, but social? For what did “women trapped in a male body” do three hundred years ago? Maybe they expanded the social category of what it is to be male so that it was expansive enough to include the “female” traits they longed for.
Well, so I think privately—but I’d never say it in front of Bree, who is a film character in need of near-constant affirmation. For this she has an extraordinary therapist—possibly unique to American shores—whom she is encouraged to phone whenever she needs the equivalent of a therapeutic cheerleading session. “It hurts,” says Bree. “That’s what hearts do,” says her therapist. “Let it out—this is good, this is so good.”
But is it? It’s finely acted by Felicity Huffman, who has exactly the careful, overstylized physical movements used by those who aspire to the feminine and feel they do not naturally possess it. She has her icky wardrobe of light pink separates and chiffon neckerchiefs, a Harry Belafonte basso and the prickly vulnerability of the permanently self-conscious. But around a bold performance shelter cardboard cutouts: a sassy old black woman and a wise Native American, an unsupportive Suburban Mom in an electric blue shell suit and a street-kid son (Kevin Zegers) who has gone off the rails.
When this son, Toby, attempts to make the road trip go faster by explaining how the subtext of The Lord of the Rings is “totally gay,” I felt we were driving dangerously close to contemporary cliché land. When Bree took him to task for using the word like in every sentence, we’d made a camp in cliché land and bedded down for the night. The film thinks it brings cultural news, with its talk of “stealth” transsexuals who “walk amongst us,” but really none of these characters walks among us—they haven’t the imaginative breadth to survive in our world. They walk in another land, a mirror land through which Charlize Theron and Hilary Swank (two actresses the official publicity notes shamelessly compare to Huffman) have walked before, a place where the fact that the central female role is “unflattering” is considered a daring artistic act in and of itself.
If you are one of those people who, like me, found Hilary Swank better looking in Boys Don’t Cry than she ever is on the red carpet, you too might find it surprising that we are meant to think Felicity Huffman’s brown hair and lack of backless Versace dress a terrible deprivation. She has a handsome beauty that is not obscured in this film and a gift for characterization that deserves a better script. But Bree’s journey was never intended to genuinely challenge ideas of female beauty or femininity itself or gender dysmorphia or the surgery now regularly practiced to “correct” it. It was meant to be a nice hook to hang a movie on. And so it is.
Romance & Cigarettes is the last film I am