The movie where Felicity Huffman earned a Best Actress in a Drama Golden Globe award registered with me as a fun tale about a small corner of the gender spectrum, one where most viewers will have their first exposure. In short, "Transamerica" is a solid film with a knockout performance by Huffman. The plot begins with Huffman as a pre-operative transsexual woman in Los Angeles who discovers she has a son, who is a juvenile delinquent in New York. She heads to New York to try to deal with the issue -- without informing the boy of the true story. She brings the boy cross-country by car, and the adventures bring them closer together while giving viewers insight into two characters with a lot in common about covering things up.
While the main plot winds along as a tender story about growing closer to family and learning to drop facades in order to gain acceptance, there are a lot of humorous situations to make this a charming movie. The nice part is that the film doesn't push the humor at the cost of the story or treating its characters as flat. Instead, the humor seems to work as a safety valve for what could have been a film that buckled under the weight of its message.
I'm pleased to be able to find nice, sweet films like "Transamerica" and "Junebug" that treat the characters as people with a story instead of a story filled with people just to ger from the opening to closing credits. Although I have seen a few of the movies in 2006, this is a ripple effect of the great year of film taht was 2005.
-- Seattle
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