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83Until it detours into dysfunctional-family comedy-drama, Transamerica rides cross-country without ever running low on bracing, cactus-spined surprises.
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80Impressively realized on all levels, this transgender spin on the road trip boasts an extraordinary central performance.
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80Transamerica is a modern-day Sullivan's Travels.
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80But the most impressive thing is how, a few minutes into the film, you stop noticing Huffman's external transformations and start to focus on the character. Not that the external stuff isn't impressive.
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80Laugh-out-loud funny, tartly off-color and ultimately touching.
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80This debut feature left me in a state of movie euphoria. Who could have guessed that such a discomfiting premise would blossom into a deadpan-hilarious and yet deeply affecting story about a singular glitch in the human condition?
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75The movie's soul is with Huffman. Speaking in a low voice, her posture as stiff as her vocabulary, her eyes a pool of sadness and hope, she turns this small, resonant film into a cry from the heart.
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75What Felicity Huffman brings to Bree is the newness of a Jane Austen heroine. She has been waiting a long time to be an ingenue, and what an irony that she must begin as a mother.
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75Despite its subject matter, Transamerica is a surprisingly funny movie, because Tucker never lets the pathos overwhelm his sense of humor.
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75This drama offers a chuckle at every turn.
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75It's a farce with heart, a meditation on identity, family and gender politics that has real faith in its characters - even when the characters themselves lack it.
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75Transamerica provides the frame and the occasion for one of the year's best performances, Felicity Huffman's as a woman trapped in a man's body who's passing for female while awaiting a sex-change operation.
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75A flawed but nevertheless endearing father-son road trip with a distinctive twist.
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75It's debatable whether watching Huffman get dressed, take hormones, and learn to use a more feminine diction could sustain an entire movie, but the character is certainly a creation more original than a lot of the film itself.
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75What a fine, tender, delicate, funny, gender-bending-and-rebending performance this is.
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75A perfect example of an ordinary movie made unique by the powerhouse performance of its lead.
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70Transamerica is about as sexual as "The Brady Bunch." It's about an intelligent woman in excruciating transition to a new body that will line up with an identity she's held all along.
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70You might feel constrained when it comes to a standing ovation, but there's certainly enough substance and yuk here to go along for the ride.
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70Transamerica itself does not always live up to its star, but it is touching and sometimes funny, despite its overall air of indie earnestness.
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70Farce born of sadly irreconcilable impulses: Bravo!
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70If Tucker's road map often feels a little too confining and the screwball comedy too contrived, he can take credit for introducing viewers to a character they have almost certainly never met before.
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70The real success of Duncan Tucker, who wrote and directed this debut feature, is that, through credible dialogue and sensitive performances, the basic idea overcomes its cleverness and is affecting.
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67The unintended effect of all the melodramatic complications in Transamerica is, oddly, to distract attention from an understanding of exactly what that courage really costs.
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67The best, and perhaps the only, reason to see Duncan Tucker's Transamerica is for Felicity Huffman's touching, shape-shifting performance.
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67It may not exactly be a traditional love letter to his wife but actor-turned-executive producer William H. Macy has given her a plum part as Bree in screenwriter-director Duncan Tucker's offbeat road movie.
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63Huffman is a woman playing a man playing a woman, which is easily the year's most complicated turn. She does a fine, nuanced job in bringing to life a character that could have become a caricature.
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63As much heralded, "edgy" movies go, Transamerica fails to live up to expectations.
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60This is actually a very middle-of-the-road movie.
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60Never lets us forget that it's a nonmainstream story about a nonmainstream subject, when ideally, it should simply be a story about a person. The picture too often feels like a lesson in tolerance.
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60Pleasant even without reaching much of a destination, Transamerica leaves the basic impression that it's not as self-satisfied as it could have been.
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60Felicity Huffman is such a wonder, at once funny and brave, playing a pre-op male-to-female transsexual in the uneven comedy Transamerica that she sustains several lapses that might otherwise have sunk it.
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An occasionally touching, more often clumsy variation on the formula of crusty oldster and problem child bonding on a road trip. The main reason to see it is "Desperate Housewives" star Felicity Huffman.
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50At its best, Transamerica made me laugh and feel for Bree. At its worst, it made me cringe at the potential creepiness of its central relationship.
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Like a preoperative transsexual, Transamerica is neither one thing nor the other. It yanks at the heartstrings too much to qualify as an edgy comedy-drama, but it's far too bawdy to make it to the Hallmark Channel.
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50By the way, the other thing that keeps Transamerica from being a mainstream movie is its obsession with penises: showing them, talking about them, placing us in bathrooms and trailers when they're in use.
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50Writer-director Duncan Tucker does little to develop his narrative setup beyond the basic and obvious, and his film begins to feel more like an exercise than a fully realized story.
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50Huffman intermittently rescues Transamerica from bathos with her brusque wit, swatting away the victimization elements that figure into most films about transsexuals.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 23 out of 25
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Mixed: 1 out of 25
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Negative: 1 out of 25
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Redlight8Just great. its refreshing to see such a serious issue dealt with in a comic way.
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VickiW.10
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JimG.8