Transamerica Review

I've always had an active interest in transgendered stories, but am almost always disappointed with Hollywood portrayals of transgendered persons as Hollywood tends to lean to either over the top and/or degenerate portrayals.  But after all the positive press and reviews of Transamerica, I finally had a chance to watch it, and this is at the top of my list of all time favorites.

A week before Bree is scheduled to undergo her surgery to complete her transformation to a full-fledged woman, the gender she felt she should have been born as, she discovered she fathered a son during her college days during a one-time fling.  Her son Toby is a junkie prostitute living on the streets in New York and dreaming of becoming a port star in Hollywood.  Bree flies to New York to rescue her son but isn't ready to reveal to him that she is his father.  Instead, she invents a story that she is there to "save him" as a Christian missionary and they start their cross country road trip back to Califormia.  What ensues is the quintessential road trip, much like many road trips, where the characters learn about each other, grow close, but also learn secrets about each other that test their newly formed bonds.  What, of course, makes this story different, is that it also offers a very realistic portrayal of what male to female transgendered persons truly go though, many of their real feelings and showing the work the reality of the transgendered world without being either over-moralizing or at the other extreme offering an characature to make fun of, both of which tend to be the norm in usual Hollywood films.  This is actually a real story with real characters that you could actually meet in real life.  This is no To Wong Fu (as ground-breaking at it was for the '90's, it was still a characature and unrealistic).  I've known a number of male to female trannies, and all I can say is that I was amazed and delighted that a mainstream Hollywood movie was grounded in reality--and no, I can never say that enough!