Transamerica is a Golden Globe Award-winning and Academy Award-nominated 2005 comedy-drama independent film produced by IFC Films and The Weinstein Company. The film tells the story of Bree, a transsexual woman (Felicity Huffman), who goes on a road trip with her long-lost son Toby (Kevin Zegers).
The movie is marked by an Academy Award-nominated and Golden Globe-winning performance by Huffman, who is also known for her Emmy Award-winning performance in Desperate Housewives.
Bree, a pre-operative, male-to-female transsexual, holds down two jobs and saves every penny so that she can pay for one last operation that will make her a woman at last. One day, however, she receives a strange phone call. It appears that on the other side is Toby, apparently her son, who must be the product of a somewhat clumsy sexual encounter years ago when she was a man. He stays in New York, incarcerated. Bree flies from Los Angeles to New York in order to get the boy out of jail. At first she is reluctant to do so, but her therapist convinces her to face up to her past. The boy is handed over to her without a word of explanation and Toby believes the woman to be some Christian missionary determined to convert reprobates to Jesus; Bree sees no reason to clear up the misunderstanding. However, she finds out that the boy just wants to escape from her and hitchhike to Los Angeles. She persuades him to accompany her back to the west coast--secretly planning to leave him at his stepfather's along the way. Toby is happy to take her up on her offer. Written by Shemek
One week before her sex-change operation, Bree receives a call from a 17-year-old identifying himself as her son from a college liaison. Bree's psychiatrist won't approve the surgery until Bree deals with this relationship, so Bree flies to New York City, bails the youth out of juvenile detention, and offers him a ride back to Los Angeles without disclosing that she is his father. Both her plans and his go awry, and as secrets will out, what might become a friendship (or more) founders. The lad's step-father, a sex-change support group, a peyote eater, a Navajo wrangler, and Bree's family all play their parts in this exploration of family, gender, and expectations. Written by
