SHAPE SHIFTER

REVIEWED - TRANSAMERICA: Both hilarious and deeply moving, Transamerica is a triumphant tale of one man's quest for the ultimate makeover, writes Michael Dwyer.

HAVING received an Emmy award last autumn as a frazzled mother-of-four in Desperate Housewives, Felicity Huffman deserved to take the Oscar last month for her adventurous and touching portrayal of an even more perplexed parent, a man who desperately wants to be a woman, in the ambiguously titled serious comedy, Transamerica.

Unrecognisable from her TV role, Huffman is a revelation as Stanley, who now prefers to be known as Bree and is holding down two jobs in Los Angeles to pay for the final stages in "sexual reassignment surgery". With just days before the operation, Bree gets a call saying that a 17-year-old rent boy, Toby (Kevin Zegers), has been arrested in New York and is claiming to be Stanley's son.

This theme of parents searching out lost sons, and sons finding lost parents, has been one of the recurring preoccupations in recent movies as diverse as Broken Flowers, Breakfast on Pluto, Don't Come Knockin', The King and L'Enfant. In Transamerica it transpires that Toby is the product of Stanley's sole heterosexual experience back in college, and Bree reluctantly goes east to bail him out.

Although Bree objects to Toby's behaviour - his grammar, smoking, cocaine snorting and street hustling - she eventually agrees to accept temporary responsibility and to drive him to his stepfather's home in Kentucky. Toby assumes his saviour is a well-intentioned Christian missionary.

They travel by car, and the screenplay takes on the form of a classic road movie as it becomes a journey on which they discover themselves and each other, and encountering diverse characters along the way: partying Dallas transsexuals, an amiable Native American named Calvin Two Goats (Graham Greene), and Bree's conservative mother (a spirited Fionnula Flanagan) who is aghast at the change in her Stanley but elated to find she has a grandson in Toby.

Over an awkward family dinner at a local restaurant, Bree's father (Burt Young) loudly declares: "We all look much happier than we are." It's a key line in a movie that reflects with insight and compassion how appearances can be deceptive and, without ever getting sentimental about it, on what lies beneath and what really matters in all the confusions of modern living.

Marking a thoroughly auspicious feature film debut for writer-director Duncan Tucker, Transamerica is a fresh, imaginative spin on a familiar genre. It is as often poignant as it's uproariously funny, as Bree struggles to conceal her true identity from Toby, and the route to revelation is inventively plotted.

Emotions seesaw in the perfectly judged interplay between these two difficult, lonely people who are brought vividly to life. Both actors transcend the obvious to dig deeper inside their characters and to mine their complexity. Zegers has screen presence to burn and Huffman is wonderfully subtle in a role that so easily could have been overplayed.