Questions + Transamerica

1) How large does a crumb seem to a mouse?

2) What the fuck is wrong with my eyes that they focus better on close range things without glasses and on long range things with glasses? Myopia, hyperopia, presbyopia? Don't tell me I need bifocals at the tender age of 47. I mean, 25.

3) Transamerica: what's all the buzz about? A.O. Scott, I never trust your pinny little head. I should have known better than to have gone to a movie about a transwoman on a road trip with her recently discovered urchin/hustler/fantasy-con-wizard-t-shirt-wearing/Adonis son with a title as painfully punned as this one. Many reasons to complain about this film, but the best is that its screenplay is an almanac of banalities, generalities, and cloying feel-goodness hiding behind the guise of showing the human face of transgender America (or something like that--A.O. Scott calls it "affirming...dignity"). Let's see what tropes were used to generate each blip in the predictable narrative: the kind matriarchal black woman speaks in Truths about a character's past; a couple drunken hillbillies either (1) stare predatorially at the protagonist transwoman's behind or (2) pummel aforementioned hustler/Adonis when the latter insinuates their history of homosexual sexual abuse; a road-faring charismatic blond hippie who gits all sexual with one of the two desperate heroes and then steals a vital possession from them (a la Brad Pitt in Thelma & Louise); a sagacious, gentlemanly Navajo man whose mellifluous intonations suggest gravity, history, and spirituality; etc., the list continues.

The movie also commits several familiar cinematic trespasses. The plot requires some stratospheric suspension of disbelief. The sweeping vistas of transamerican scenery are corrupted by overzealous soundtracking. And just as the "Little Red Riding Hood" metaphor in The Woodsman was belabored to irrelevance, some of Transamerica's were--hm, let's see, smelted, poured into gutter spike molds, and pounded with a sledgehammer into the viewer's head. The fatherless hustler who thinks his biological dad is half-Indian buys a baseball hat with a stylized Indian head on it, only to have it replaced by a real-live Indian who gives him a cowboy hat. (That's a metaphor.) The fatherless hustler confused about his identity calls the transwoman a "fake" and a "liar" while he is wielding a gimmicky "Indian" axe sold at "Sammy's Wigwam." (That's a metaphor.) The fatherless hustler tries to make out with the transwoman he doesn't realize is his father. (That's polymorphously perverse and a reference to important ideas.) (There is a nice opening scene with lowered voices and a slowed record player, I can't begrudge that.)

And, what the fuck, there are no transgender actresses to play this role? I mean, how many transwomen parts even exist in distributed movies, so why'd they go and give this one to Felicity Huffman? She's decent and passable but fundamentally fraudulent. I'm not suggesting that only actors whose identities mirror their roles can play those roles, but there's something almost Mickey-Rooney-plays-Mr.-Yunioshi perverse about it. And finally, there's definitely plenty an English doctoral student who shirks at the traditional Foucaultian medico-juridical narrative of transgender subjectivity can say about this movie, which begins with the heroine's quest for reassignment surgery and ends, happily, with said surgery.

Okay, that's all I have to say. I've successfully put off subject matter jurisdiction for an hour. Go see this movie and tell me why I'm wrong.

(Once again, the folks at Slant Magazine are smarter than me and say everything I want to say.)