Ironically, the horse is a gelding.

Bree Osborne is almost a woman. I don’t mean a burgeoning teenager, I mean a man in the final stages of hormone treatment and psychological evaluation before getting a sex-change operation. Hell of a time to find out she fathered a child back in college.

When the kid calls from the New York City jail looking for his father, Bree’s therapist says she won’t consent to the surgery until Bree deals with this blast from the past. Bree flies out from LA and introduces herself to Toby (Kevin Zegers) as a church volunteer come to bail him out and buy him a hot meal. But it’s harder than she imagined disentangling herself from her street-hustler son and the two of them take off on a cross-country road-trip back to Los Angeles, where Bree hopes to lose an appendage by the end of the week and Toby plans to break into porn flicks. (Seems like an achievable goal.)

They just don't make Father's Day cards for this situation.

Along the way they encounter a variety of characters, including Toby’s uber-creepy stepfather, a happy band of trans-sexuals, a potential love-interest for Bree and her judgmental family. They also hesitantly start to develop a relationship, getting to know each other in fits and starts, each alternately arguing with and accepting the other, and I found this tentative dance to be realistic and compelling. Bree, who had no desire to even meet her child, finds herself drawn to him in spite of herself. Toby’s character is a little more problematic. He’s volatile and maddening at times, vulnerable and sympathetic at others, just like a real teenager. Less believable is his child-like clinging to elaborate fantasies about the wealthy, loving father he’s sure he’ll find in Los Angeles. A kid his age and with his background would have likely wised up on that score by now.

As Bree, Felicity Huffman is generating a lot of awards buzz, and deservedly so. From the first moments of the film, when we see her swathed in pink, she inhabits this character who is working really hard at being Woman. Her voice, the way she moves, her mannerisms, are all heartbreakingly indicative of somebody who has to spend every moment concentrating on simply appearing to be what she longs to be for real. This gets some laughs, but they’re never mean-spirited and it heightens the joy we feel in those moments when Bree does manage to relax and feel comfortable in her own skin. It’s a bravura performance.

For a movie about trans-gender issues Transamerica is surprisingly conventional, but I think that works in its favor. In this day and age, penises come and go, but family angst is universal.

Gorilla Pants rating: 3.5 out of 4 bananas