Transamerica

—1. Overview
—2. Cast and Crew
—3. Photo Pages
—4. Trailers, Clips, DVDs, Books, Soundtrack
—5. Posters (Current Films)
—6. Production Notes (pdf)
—7. Spiritual Connections
—8. Presentation Downloads

Poor Bree! She is days away from the final surgery that will compete her gender reassignment. It is a long and trying process – years of surgery, hormones, learning to live, walk and talk like a woman, counseling. Then, just as she has everything in order, she discovers that she may have fathered a child many years ago.

She tries to ignore this, but her therapist insists that she has to find out. It is a part of her life she is trying to push away – her life as a man. She always talks of that time in the third person – it was Stanley’s life, not hers. Now Stanley’s life is forcing itself into Bree’s anticipated life.

What follows is something of a road movie. Bree goes to New York, bails her son Toby out of prison and starts off with him to California. She has not revealed who she is – or, for that matter, that she is not fully female yet. They begin the trip as strangers, but as often happens in road movies, they grow together.

A few days before seeing Transamerica, I led a discussion at church about The Straight Story, another road movie. We outlined the way road movies give us a linear view of a story. Here is where we begin; here is where we end. In The Straight Story we don’t learn about the trip home – and it really doesn’t matter. But in Transamerica the story is all about the journey home – even when they don’t know that’s where they’re headed.

Both Bree and Toby want to be rootless. They each distance themselves from the families of their past. Bree, trying to find someone to take care of Toby, goes to his home town where she discovers the secret pain he has suffered. Later, Bree and Toby end up having to look into Bree’s family background and discover the pain that is there. But these are not the homes that they are traveling to. Unbeknownst to them, they are traveling to a new home, and they are becoming new people.

The homes they are avoiding are not really home for them. They are history that has to be addressed for Bree and Toby to be able to find their new lives. Bree and Toby are also an unknown part of each other’s past, but could be an important part in their new lives.

Bree and Toby are both lonely people. Bree is living “stealth,� that is, passing as a woman, even though still physically a man. Stealth is a perfect description of her life – it is totally hidden. When a psychiatrist asks her in her final interview if her friends support her sex change, she can only respond that she has a close relationship with her therapist. We see her washing dishes in a restaurant and calling people for telemarketing sales. She is very much alone.

Toby is a street hustler who has been getting by as a male prostitute. There is nothing in his future. His highest ambition is to go to California to star in porn films. He is a survivor. He learned how to survive abuse at home; now he uses his limited skills to survive whatever trouble comes his way – even this strange woman who claims to be from “the Church of the Potential Father.�

These two can never be a traditional father and son. Let’s face it, Bree is trying to become a woman – not really father material. Yet they have the chance to find in each other something that has been missing from their lives – someone who will care for them and about them.

What lies at the end of their road trip could be a new life. They have the chance, whether through surgery, education, or opportunities, to be reborn. They will never really leave all their past behind them; we never do. They can be remade into the people they want and need to be. But we see, even after they make it to California, that just completing their plans are not enough for their rebirth. They aren’t fully reborn until they find in each other a relationship that completes the process. When that happens, they have found grace.

Much of God’s Good News is about the chance to be reborn – to be made new. It doesn’t happen because of what we do, but because of the relationship God builds with us and we build with others. It is then, through grace, that we discover what it means to be home.

— Overview