(2 stars out of five)Writer/director Duncan Tucker's debut feature is a potentially interesting story in desperate need of a better-realized film. Felicity Huffman is wonderful in it. She convincingly plays a transexual with a subtlety that the rest of the film doesn't have. The film is loud and obvious when it shouldn't be and frustratingly undefined when it comes to the supporting characters. The movie is quite simply a mess. It's all over the place. It's horribly edited (drags on forever), clumsily written (same old "road-trip story"), and filled with terrible dialogue (when a character gives an astoundingly out-of-place monologue about the "gay undertones" in The Lord of the Rings, that's when I start to groan). Even worse is the fact that the film itself gets in the way of Huffman's performance: The movie starts out well enough - it starts simply and assuredly, letting the story tell itself and allowing Huffman's performance to shine. Then, the whole comic "road-trip" starts, and the film goes down in flames. There are moments in the very beginning of the film where we are allowed to study Huffman's face and learn what's beneath the surface; sadly, those sort of moments quickly disappear, and it almost feels as if the director has forgotten that he has actors up on screen. He treats them as props, moving them from one scene to the next with no sense of development or character arc. Against all odds, however, Felicity Huffman manages to inject emotion into the film. Much like the way an actor on stage must talk louder for the audience to hear him, Felicity is somehow determined not to get lost in the chaos of the film. She gives it a center, and that's the only reason this isn't zero stars. It's a pity her performance couldn't have been in a better film.
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