Performance, and humor mark film

Felicity Huffman played Bree before 'Desperate Housewives.'
By JAMI BERNARD
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Between the higher-profile "Breakfast on Pluto" and the low-budget, unpretentious "Transamerica," the award for most appealing gender-bending performance goes to Felicity Huffman in the latter, where she's playing a man who's about to have surgery to become a woman.
Before she was a Desperate Housewife, Huffman turned in this tour de force in what turns out to be a funny, charming, heartfelt road movie about a most unlikely pair -- a teenage-delinquent hustler and a conservative transsexual who fathered the boy back in the days before he wore skirts and practiced getting his voice into the upper registers.
Unusual spin
The story of Bree (Huffman) isn't what you'd expect -- one that begs for tolerance in a cruel world. It's not even particularly about sexual identity, though Bree's predicament puts an unusual spin on the road-movie genre: people understanding themselves better by forging bonds with one another.
This drama offers a chuckle at every turn. Bree is horrified to learn on the eve of "her" surgery that she's a dad. She bails the sullen kid out of jail, not out of the kindness of her heart, or any maternal or paternal instinct, but because it's a condition set by her no-nonsense shrink (Elizabeth Pena) that she wrap up the loose ends of her life before going to the hospital.
Toby (Kevin Zegers) thinks Bree is a quaint church lady who's just doing the Christian thing by giving him a lift to California to find the father he never knew. He doesn't realize Bree is a he -- the creature is so weirdly uptight that her gender is almost irrelevant. Neither a handsome man nor a beautiful woman, Bree is destined to be an odd duck no matter how things turn out.
The deceptions pile up, but the humor emanates from the characters, not their zany circumstances. After spending years trying to pass as a woman, Bree now has to pass as devout and disinterested. Bree has survived thus far only by concocting an elaborate universe for herself, one that crumbles with each mile on the odometer. Huffman's performance is a marvel of physical struggle and inner turmoil.
It's a kaleidoscopic viewing experience: Huffman the woman is playing a man trying to copy female mannerisms while the male ones keep bleeding through like an old paint job beneath the whitewash.
The character is enormously self-conscious, while the actress can't allow herself that luxury. Huffman is sensational.