Toronto 2005: Day Eight

DAY EIGHT

Thursday was a day of disappointment at the screening room.

Hot buzz doc Heart of the Game (aka Mad Hot Basketball) was bought by Miramax (the ongoing Disney concern, not The Weinstein Company), but however well it may be playing for festival audiences, it turned out to be a nearly-shocking bit of mediocre documentary making.

It is a good story and there is some good material in the film. However, the vast majority of the storytelling comes in narration, with the footage punctuating the narration instead of the other way around. As a result, more than any of the theatrical docs I’ve seen in the last two years, it felt like a Discovery Channel show... just short of the production values that makes it worthy of sitting in a theater or even really to be in the realm of the top HBO docs like Born Into Brothels or Twist of Faith.

The classic example inside of the movie is when it jumps, essentially, from the sad end of one basketball season to the playoffs in the next season. During this period, one of the central characters in the story goes through a major transformation which we experience almost exclusively in voice over. If the story is worth our attention, where is the footage telling her story?

On the flipside, The Weinstein Company (which is an independent, although Disney has a financial interest in most of their films) has an awards hopeful that cracked on the floor of reality with all the gentleness of an egg on a hot day. In spite of a strong effort by Felicity Huffman (who at times seems to have borrowed the ears from her husband’s turn in Door To Door), Transamerica is such a shallow look at its subject that it would really be challenged as weak in any cable TV setting from Lifetime up.

Just how misconceived is this film? The central character is a pre-operative transsexual who discovers the week before her operation (male to female) that she had a son as a man in her one tryst. As a result, the psychiatrist (or is Elizabeth Pena some sort of other mental health professional... it’s left unclear, outside of her having the say on whether the operation takes place) decides that “Bree” needs to confront her progeny before she can have her operation. This premise sets a clock going that is left painfully loose in the film.

When we meet the son, we find out that he is prostituting himself to men. Is he gay? We never know. But you might expect the son’s sexuality to at least stir some conversation about his father’s sexual issues. No. You might expect that the discovery of a son would play as more than an inconvenience along the way to an operation. No... though the film does get quickly sentimental in the third act. And when Bree decides to see her family, who not only are unaware of her son, but with whom she has estranged herself on the road to her sex change, you might expect that it would be a major even that her therapist would want to analyze before agreeing to the sex change talking place. (If flying across country to get her son out of jail was a required activity, shouldn’t analyzing it be one as well?) No.

Everything in the movie is played off with a nudge and a wink as though writer/director Duncan Tucker was trying to get to the end of the nutty hour-long Desperate Sex Lives. Really, if you stop and think about just how intense a vein Tucker dug into here and just how shallow the examination is, it is kind of breathtaking. You are about to get a sex change that you have fought to be allowed to receive, your have lost your relationship with your family, you have no support system outside of medical offices, and your newly found son is a drug-taking, drug-selling prostitute who has major issues with his own identity. But this film is busy badly treading Tootsie turf, where I must remind you, Dustin Hoffman’s only mental issues were obstinacy and chauvinism.

For me, the film can be reduced – only a little unfairly - to one piece of business. Ms. Huffman - who is game, but is far from Oscar legitimacy because of the script and great sloppiness in how she is shot and recorded – wears a scarf through much of the movie. Why do pre-operative (and often, post-operative) transsexuals wear scarves? Well, besides style, for men becoming women, it hides the tell-tale Adam’s Apple. In Transamerica, when Ms. Hoffman’s Bree gets soaked, she uses her scarf to put up her hair. No Adam’s Apple. Moreover, Ms. Hoffman has a lovely long neck that is one of the most feminine things possible, especially as the film tries to make her face less soft. If she really was a pre-op, this neck would be her favorite part of her body and she would be showing it off endlessly instead of hiding it at all time. It’s a small issue, but it tells you everything about this movie. Lots of good actors details and huge gaping holes in the work of the writer/director.

Annette Bening (whose Mrs. Harris is not being released for Oscar season... a good choice) can get away with a good performance in a weak movie and still get lifted into the awards season. Felicity Huffman can not. More importantly, Istvan Szabo may not have made a great film last year, but he created a big fluffy foundation for Ms. Bening to float on. Not so Mr. Tucker. He may turn out to be a special writer/director some day. He certainly is ambitious in his first choice of a major film canvas. But he struck out swinging here.

by David Poland