Huffman juggles genders

For a woman to play a man, or a man a woman, is one thing. But for a woman to play a man who wants to be a woman is quite another. In Duncan Tucker's film a brilliant Felicity Huffman does just that as Bree (formerly Stanley), an LA transsexual just about to have the gender-reassignment op.

The poor man-woman is being harried by the medical authorities and by psychiatrists, as such patients often are in real life: if you want to become a 'real' woman by having the operation, you have to do exactly what they say, and it can take years.

In this case, having discovered she had a son as the result of a clumsy sexual encounter much earlier in life, Bree foolishly tells the therapy bullies and they refuse the operation until the decent thing is done by the boy.

Unfortunately the son (Kevin Zegers) is a drugged-up male prostitute who fancies himself as a gay porn star. Bree has to bail him out of jail in New York and then takes him back home to her parents.

She tells him she's a Christian missionary determined to save him from himself. Once back home, he discovers her secret. Well, how would you like to have a dad who's a mum?

Among the best scenes, played for comedy but intimating near-tragedy, are those when Bree arrives home to find her tiresomely controlling mother totally shocked at her son's transformation, her father open-mouthed and her younger, ex-alcoholic sister scarcely able to stifle her giggles.

She has left the handsome, if difficult, son outside. 'If that's your boyfriend,' says her sister enviously, 'I'll slit my wrists!'

Much of the rest of the movie is concerned with the affection that burgeons between the boy and his odd father as they ride together in an old car across country, and it is handled well.

But it is Huffman who lifts a better than average film into the realms of something like Sideways. She doesn't just steal the picture. She makes it absolutely her own.

She shows how you can be funny and desperate at the same time. Not many can manage that.

Transamerica
Cert: 15