Linda Ruth Williams (of Sight & Sound) is delighted by Hollywood's latest attempt at queering the heartlands of conservative America: Duncan Tucker's beautiful and original trans-gender road movie

The title seems to say it all: a road movie in which a transsexual traverses the US continent. Yet this indie-spirited film is far from a high-concept off-the-peg folly. Instead, Transamerica affectionately delivers some familiar standards while twisting them with a new metrosexual spin. Pre-operative Bree (formerly Stanley) is about to complete gender realignment when she learns of the existence of her son Toby, who was conceived during a single night of heterosexual experimentation in Bree's college days. Without telling him who she really is, and urged by her counsellor to face up to the loose ends of her past, Bree bails Toby, a rent boy, out of a New York jail and the pair set off across America - initially to reunite the 17-year-old with his stepfather in Kentucky. How will the conservative southern states of America react to them, and what will they find in each other? Amazingly, a beautiful and original comedy has been crafted from this mix of old and new, which is orchestrated against a backdrop of standard straight roads and sublime sunsets, and played out to a musical soundtrack that moves from bluegrass to country to Tex-Mex as the states roll by.

Why, then, does transsexuality lend itself so well to the road-movie format? One answer might be that the genre is particularly well suited to indulging individualist self-discovery, a pioneerism of the mind as well as of the landscape. The 'new' territories discovered by Bree as she moves, like America's original white settlers, from east coast to west, are gendered and familial. The well-structured story is paced by the US map: first stop is the Kentucky home where Toby discovered his mother's body after her suicide and was sexually abused by his low-life stepfather. Next up it's a transsexual house party in Dallas. Then it's a night-time roadside pee on the Great Plains, when Toby discovers what's hidden in Bree's concealing underwear. Then onto New Mexico, and an encounter with a feckless hitchhiker (didn't Bree see Thelma and Louise?), before there's a glowing glimpse of possible post-operative happiness with a charming native-American cowboy. And all this is topped by an explosive visit to Bree's parents in Arizona, where much is revealed, confronted and reconciled.

The firm backbone of all this is Felicity Huffman's Golden Globe-winning and Oscar-nominated performance as Bree, whose expression is permanently poised somewhere between distaste, disgust and dismay. As Toby, Kevin Zegers is attractively dissolute but still something of a little boy, sexually amoral but in some ways more honourable than his parent. Fionnula Flanagan does a show-stopping turn as Bree's awful southern mother, all kitten-heeled mules and too much pancake. Indeed, the unholy trio resident in Bree's Phoenix family home - loud mother, unflappable father (Burt Young), barely on the wagon sister Sydney (Carrie Preston) - brilliantly underline the film's primary 'truth' that there is nothing normal under the hot US sun. But it is Huffman who has to keep most balls in the air (as it were) in order to accomplish the multifaceted charade that is Bree. As a father masquerading as a Christian missionary (from "the church of the potential father") come to rescue Toby at the beginning of the film, she can maintain her crisp attitude to moral guidance, and is perhaps the securest parent figure the boy has ever had. As man passing as woman (in "deep stealth") she pulls off a delicately orchestrated array of co-ordinated separates and matching scarves, facing the world with a worried look of demure determination. There are other motifs too that evocatively tell this story of 'passing' and failing: the voice-training video Bree studies (Find Your Female Voice); the opera record she slows with her finger, making the singer's voice descend from soprano to baritone; the little girl who asks her blankly, "Are you a boy or a girl?" Sydney says: "I can still see Stanley in you, but it's like you put yourself through a strainer and got rid of all the boy-pulp." And Huffman manages brilliantly to intimate that the pulp was once there. Spookily, even though we know she's a glamorous Hollywood star, she doesn't make a particularly convincing woman in Transamerica. Given the realism of the prosthetic penis incident, I'm sure that some viewers will assume Bree is played by a man. Perhaps trans-gender performance will become the next staple in Hollywood's 'uglying-up' vogue.

More worryingly, Transamerica presents a remarkably benign view of the sexual politics of the US interior. No one in this liberal version of America's 'red states' condemns Bree as harshly as she condemns herself. This may mean that conservative audiences take Transamerica to heart, armed with the knowledge that Bree's not really a he, but is instead that nice woman from Desperate Housewives. Perhaps Bree is just lucky in the folks she bumps into. Toby, of course, is streetwise enough to be supremely unfazed by proceedings: even the screamingly "gender-gifted" guests at the transsexual party in Dallas provoke the simple response "I thought they were nice". In contrast, Bree waxes on about "ersatz women". She says: "Ersatz means phoney. Something pretending to be something it's not." But it is Bree who is the most ersatz thing in the movie - not because she's a phoney female, but because she's a phoney missionary and a phoney friend. Toby finally has no problem with her gender realignment, only with her lack of openness ("you're not a freak; you're just a liar"). An Arizona policewoman is similarly accepting, barely batting an eyelid when told that Bree is Toby's father. Even Bree's 'ersatz' family quickly accept her: dad has no problem; Sydney wants to use Bree's deviance only "to freak mom out"; while mom herself (the least liberal character in the movie) manages to call her son Bree and finance a flight back to the operating theatre - and that barely 24 hours after first seeing him transformed into a woman.

Transamerica gets away with these slippages by being at times very funny, the humour serving to normalise the sheer sexual strangeness of everyone other than the delicately strained and brittlely asexual Bree… Brilliant as director-writer Duncan Tucker's screenplay is, Transamerica is more a comedy of identities and misunderstandings than of language, a comedy exposing people divided by common assumptions concerning what proper men and women, or real mothers and fathers, are (or should be). Toby has kept one precious photo of his "real dad" (against which the present-day Bree is unrecognisable, unreal), spinning around it an image of Californian luxury and romantic native-American genes. Bree maintains a myth of Toby's down-home family upbringing which sustains her until the encounter with the child-molesting wicked stepfather. Strangers repeatedly refer to her as Toby's mother. She rejects the role; though, speaking to her counsellor over the phone, she does wail: "I really don't think I'm cut out to be a mother!" So in Transamerica people's views of each other are only partially accurate, though they may love each other despite the misunderstanding. Interweaving such competing images, Transamerica shows how necessary fantasy is as it shores up identities that are both tough and precarious.

Felicity Huffman on Researching Her Role as a Transgender Woman in "Transamerica"

"Desperate Housewives" star Felicity Huffman plays a genetic male about to take the final step to become the woman he's always dreamed of being in "Transamerica," written and directed by Duncan Tucker and co-starring Kevin Zegers.

Felicity Huffman "…When I got this pastry role of 'I'm a woman playing a man becoming a woman', I was lost. Once I understood the internal journey, which took awhile, I started reading every article I could get my hands on. I saw every documentary I could and I think I read every biography and autobiography I could find. I started going to transgender conventions because, as with any segment of society, there's a wide spectrum and Bree was in a particular place so I wanted to see a lot of different transgender women. I worked with two transgender women…and we did everything from just going to the house and talking with them, what's their story like, what was it like when they told their parents, and what it was like the first time you walked out the door as a woman and what's the operation like? What's the hormones like? I mean, everything to going through the script page by page to make sure that they felt it was true - different than their story, but true. Then I found a coach, which was helpful, who coaches men who are becoming women because most of the time men are older. Because it's expensive - the hormones and the sexual reassignment surgery is expensive so you have to save up money for it.

It's such a tough choice they're given. Either you feel alienated from yourself or you actually do it and you're alienated from society. You're an oddball. So who can face that choice? It usually takes until you're a little older to go, 'I don't care. I have to really be who I am.' Consequently you get 30, 40 year-old guys who go, 'Okay, tomorrow wear a dress and go work it [laughing]. And make sure you make the colors that work well on your skin.' How to put on makeup…it's a whole new world, to sound like Aladdin. So she coached me as if I was new to everything, which was really helpful.

With all this, I was trying to do some voice work. One thing the hormones do not change is your voice. You can look like Kate Moss - and some of these transgender women do, they're incredibly stealth - but you sound like James Earl Jones. They have these deep voices. There's a lot of training out there about finding your female voice and it is in there because you don't want to sound like Tony Curtis in 'Some Like It Hot.' [laughing] We don't have the chest capacity and our head's not big enough for the resonance, so I worked with transgender women on it. They didn't know how to work on it backwards. And I worked with a couple of voice teachers in L.A. and it sounded fake or too deep. Finally I found a woman in NY named Katie Bull and we approached the voice work in the same way I approached the acting work, which was from the inside out. So what does your voice feel like when it comes out? What does her voice express? It expresses discomfort; it expresses loneliness. It expresses self consciousness and so we kind of worked backwards and finally found it and a warm up, and that's what we would do everyday. And I had to stay in that voice."

Felicity Says Meeting Transgender Individuals Changed Her View of the Role of Bree: "It did. When I got the role, the transgender community was an oddity at best. Some odd little group over there that don't quite know what they're doing. Once I started meeting with them, talking and working with them… I really understood the heart-wrenching dilemma they're under. Of course, I always wanted to do a decent job on the film but after getting to know that community, I was desperate not to screw it up. I'm sure there's a better way of putting it."

Felicity on Her Character's Sexuality: "It's a huge question. …This part of Bree, she's very shut down, very closed in, very frightened. Actually her sexuality is dormant. I know it's a gender issue but sexually, it's dormant. I know she has that sweet flirtation with Graham Greene who plays Calvin, sort of like a high school girl who goes, 'Oh my God, I think he likes me!'

How I approached her sexuality was where she's coming from emotionally and that was that people don't see who she really is. She feels, 'Everyone doesn't see me, doesn't appreciate me. My family doesn't know me for who I am and I can't manifest who I am in the world.' She felt self loathing. We've all been there. We've all woken up and said I just can't believe that I'm waking up in myself again. And she lives there. That's where I took the sexuality."

Felicity on Her What Drew Her to "Transamerica:" "The story, the script. It's always the script. I mean, if it lives on the page, it lives on stage, as they say. I was so glad it wasn't an 'issue' movie - transgender individuals are people too - and you go, 'Yeah, and the other 103 minutes what are you going to do?' And the part... If I could do it justice, it was just a fantastic opportunity and I hadn't done anything close to that on film. I've done it on stage, not the gender thing but trying to transform myself, so those two things together."

Felicity Walks Us Through the Hair and Make-Up Process: "It was so fast. I have about 90 minutes on 'Desperate Housewives' to make me pretty, [laughing] but Bree was fast because where she is in her transformation - she doesn't want to go makeup shopping and go to the counter and ask, 'What base do you think I am?' So she does it through the mail and wants to be lighter and feminine so the base color wasn't going to match, and it's got to be thick because it's got to cover any stubble. She's had 350 hours of electrolysis but there's still stubble.

At first we did a screen test where I felt it was a version of Tammy Faye Baker [laughing] so I was concerned. 'Oh no, flag on the play.' So we took it off and just put the base on and accentuated my features, which are long. That's all we did. Jason Hayes made the wigs and the brilliant Danny Glicker did the costumes, which were all catalog and were all cheap because she wouldn't go clothes shopping. She needed things that fit her. She didn't know what color looked best on her - lavender is the color of transformation so she's going for that. So within the boundaries of where Bree was, it was sort of a natural answer once you started investigating."

Felicity on How Playing This Confusing Gender Affected Her Personally: "It actually did in an odd way because I'm not one of those actors just because I'm able to do it, I lost myself in the part and didn't know who I was. I mean, I wish I could. Towards the end of filming, I walked into the ladies room in full regalia and I'm not kidding, I walked in and went, 'Wow, I'm not supposed to be here,' and I walked out. Then I said, 'Oh no, I am,' and walked back in again. [Laughing] It took me twice before I said, 'Okay, I'm actually a woman,' and walked into the ladies room. That was sort of frightening [laughing].
The other time I actually felt the part was living in me and getting me a bit off balance is when Duncan [Tucker, writer/director] came to me and said he wanted to shoot me by the side of the road and peeing. That wasn't in the script, the full-on shot. To digress a second, wasn't it interesting because it's a moment that pulls you out of the movie just cause it's so shocking? It pulls you out of the story and yet in at the same time. It's a wonderful take there that switches you around. Oh God, no pun intended [laughing]. So when he said he wanted to shoot that, I burst into tears. I was sobbing and couldn't breathe. He said, 'What? What? It's a prosthetic and it doesn't matter.' I realized that I was living with Bree so long that the idea of even doing it for the crew and showing that was humiliating because it wasn't who I was, and it wasn't who I truly am. I found it too vulnerable."

Speaking of Body Issues… How does Felicity deal with her own body issues as an actress in Hollywood? Huffman said, "It's a real struggle. I have to say that at times it feels there are gale force winds and I'm hanging on to the back of my chair going, 'It's alright. I really do like my body. I don't care.' And oftentimes I come out of wardrobe and costume fittings I can't breathe and have to regain my balance. I'm a size 6, Geez! So I feel it constantly and it's a struggle… After I had my children, I have to say I like my body a whole lot better. I can actually eat and go, 'Yes, I'm a size 6 or size 8,' and that's kind of hard to say for Hollywood, that's big. I go about my day and have dinner anyway."

Felicity Huffman on Balancing "Transamerica" and "Desperate Housewives:" Huffman filmed the pilot of "Desperate Housewives," did "Transamerica," and then returned to work on the "Desperate Housewives" series. Huffman admits that that period of her professional life was awkward at times. "If you watch the first four or five episodes of 'Desperate Housewives,' I am not good [laughing]. No, really, I couldn't get Marc [Cherry's] rhythm afterwards. 'Desperate Housewives' has a certain voice and it's a certain sarcastic, loving, wicked, twisty voice, and you need to play with that. I came in a little heavy-handed so yes, it was a really hard transition to make. [Laughing] Plus I kept answering to Marcia Cross' character, Bree."

Felicity Huffman Analyzes "Desperate Housewives:" "I think Marc has done a brilliant thing. He's taken the icon of the American family and he's held it up for ridicule. But because Marc loves it, it's not ridicule that pulls it down and the stories poke fun at it and make people go, 'Oh, I feel good, but that's funny.' When you do that, you have to have extremes. You have to have the extreme Gabrielle, you have to have the extreme Bree, the Edie, the Susan and the me. I'm the extreme mom. I've had parents come up to me and say, 'Can't you just enjoy your little boys a little on the show?' And I'm wondering and I'd say yes, but on the other hand I say no."

Huffman confirmed her "Desperate Housewives" co-star Teri Hatcher still brings homemade goodies to the set. "Oh my god, she's the best baker in the world. But I do everything I can to stay away from them at all costs. Everyone loves when she brings in her baked goods and she does it pretty often, too."

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