Oracle Online

Only a week away from her life-altering surgery, Bree unwittingly confides in her therapist and only friend, played by Elizabeth Pena (Batteries Not Included, Jacob’s Ladder). It turns out that Bree’s therapist insists (to the point of declining to approve Bree’s approaching surgery) that she fly to New York and meet her son. Posing as a church missionary, Bree reluctantly picks up her son and learns that he has been prostituting himself on the streets of New York.

The meeting is somewhat awkward and timid. Bree avoids telling her son the truth about who she really is, but feels guilty leaving him alone in New York. Toby, played by Kevin Zegers (Air Bud), expresses interest in making his way to Los Angeles to enter the adult film industry once Bree claims she has to immediately return to California.

A phone call to her therapist sets in motion a road trip from New York to Los Angeles (Bree cannot afford to pay for the airfare for two) with the eventual realization for Toby that Bree is his biological father.

Along the way are some standout performances from Graham Greene (Dances With Wolves, Thunderheart) as a man that falls for Bree and Fionnula Flanagan (“Rich Man, Poor Man,” The Others) and Burt Young (Rocky) as Bree’s wildly disappointed parents.

Transamerica is one of several critically acclaimed recent films dealing with GLBT characters. Huffman rightly won a Golden Globe for her performance, and with a little luck, will also win the Oscar. Likewise, other films like Brokeback Mountain, Capote, and Breakfast on Pluto have been sweeping the awards circuits and hopefully point toward a trend in cinema that will continue to make GLBT representations lauded and accessible to mainstream audiences.

Many reviews for the aforementioned films point out that these films are so well made and so successful because the characters are like everyone else; they aren’t alien beings. Roger Ebert comments that Transamerica works as a film because “Bree is so persistently and patiently herself. If she had been wilder, stranger, more extroverted, the movie might fly off the rails.”

What is disturbing to me about comments like this concerning characters like Bree and the cowboys in Brokeback Mountain is that critics are implying that heterosexual audience members are only enjoying these films because the characters are not challenging notions of gender roles. After all, Bree is passable as a woman, and Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger are not effeminate, but, in fact, extremely masculine.

So what if Bree’s character looked a bit more like Tom Wilkinson in Normal, a film also portraying a male-to-female transsexual with an actual male lead? Needless to say, Wilkinson does not look nearly as passable as a woman.
Why does Roger Ebert think Bree would make a less successful character if she were visibly strange, or in other words, more visibly an male-to-female transsexual? Why can America relate to gay cowboys as two people in love only if they don’t act effeminate? Would any of these films have garnered as much mainstream attention? Or would they simply be destined cult classics, placed on the rental shelves between Hedwig and the Angry Inch and Jeffrey?

Though both Transamerica and Brokeback Mountain are important films that prove a wider array of audiences are willing to go see and applaud representations of different (in this case GLBT) communities, both critics and audience members are subversively denigrating these representations.

With comments like Ebert’s, and many others, it seems that heteronormative audiences can only relate to characters like Bree if they are toned down, less wild, more normative, and, to be blunt, less queer. Does anyone remember reading a review about Sleepless in Seattle or Pretty Woman or any other heterosexual romantic drama or comedy stating that finally we can see a representation that we can relate to because the characters are not alien, exotic, or just too damn hetero?