aliasanythingyouwant

Scott Coffey's Life of A Lower-Rung Hollywood Nitwit, Ellie Parker, is interesting only as a showcase for the shape-shifter charms of Naomi Watts, a performing chameleon with an endless repertoire of faces (sultry, girlish, devious, ravishing, vacant). The film might actually be more worthwhile, and would certainly be more bearable, with the sound off, sparing us the interminable feather-headed nattering of its deliberately shallow, narcissistic characters, and allowing us to concentrate more fully on the thespic acrobatics of Watts, who, through the character of struggling, stubborn, wayward Ellie Parker, is afforded a chance to show off her near-freakish ability at sudden metamorphosis, going from harried phone-talking California twit to foul-mouthed gum-chomping Jersey girl and back, working the shift, the brakes like a race-car driver navigating the twists and turns of Watkins Glen. It's a show-off performance but Watts is not a show-off, she occupies the character of Ellie Parker fully, never tipping her hand. Her commitment to the role is commendable, her willingness to place herself in absurd situations, to unmask herself a little (some of Ellie's struggles are no doubt culled from Watts' own biography), but it's all in service of material that's not worthy of her, that cheapens her accomplishment, diminishes her. It's a thin gruel of a movie, lacking in insight, full of scenes that don't go anywhere, shot like a film student making an audition reel.

Michael Winterbottom's Code 46 seeks to conjure the ghosts of Godard's Alphaville, the sophisticated approach to grunginess, provocative sci-fi texture accomplished with a minimum of technical trickery, a haggard protagonist discovering love amidst the dehumanization. Godard, however, was an artist, a dazzling manipulator of form and a pop-imagist to rival Warhol, where Winterbottom is merely a poseur. What Code 46 achieves is not a vision but a day-dream, the spooky, drifting quality of a Nyquil reverie. The director's off-hand approach is meant to call forth a sense of mysterious undertones, ideas moving beneath the action, a certain spiritual hum, but what he accomplishes instead is an insufferable meaninglessness, the sense of throw-away characters occupying a disposable story, Tim Robbins trying to seem enigmatic but only looking wrung-out, Samantha Morton voice-overs offering philosophical nuggets that don't have to melt in your mouth because they've already gone to goo.

The plot might've made for a decent sci-fi potboiler, telepathic insurance investigator travels to multi-cultural Shanghai to uncover fraud involving temporary passports, falls for girl involved in crime, tries to flee but is drawn back, becomes embroiled in genetic weirdness, crazy future laws, the sense of a world where ethnic identity is disappearing, except that Winterbottom the artiste thinks himself above his own material, cannot condescend to treat any of it with a real storyteller's touch (or simply doesn't know how to). It's all dimly interesting but never really engaging, not intellectually and certainly not on the pop-level most movies like this succeed at (even Alphaville, for all its scruffy/elegant ambiguity, has pop-cred). Winterbottom is going for something quite beyond his talents, a mix of the tangible and the elusive, the very thing Godard achieved in Alphaville, lofty ideas sprung from pulpish places, a dogged romanticism existing within a vaguely nightmarish vision of humanity's future. Winterbottom is simply not enough in the spirit of what he's trying to do, doesn't love images enough to carry off such a conception. He comes across like a music video director who's gotten in over his head.

The pre-operative transsexual hero/heroine of Duncan Tucker's Transamerica is something of a novelty in the annals of moviedom, a gender-conflicted, misfit character who isn't flamboyant or exhibitionistic, who has no desire to join some wacky underground scene, is not in the least bit a freak (a freak being a person who deliberately plays up their oddness, seeking to shock or offend). Bree, the soon-to-be-female telemarketer, is not an Andy Warhol sort of jabbering, dissipated fruitcake, a garish John Waters monstrosity, an Almodovarian flake done up in feathers and face paint; she's a nobody from a nowhere town whose desire for gender reassignment is not some quasi-suicidal impulse, some urge for self-nullification, some act of defiance in the face of a world that refuses to recognize her. Bree's motives seem clear enough - she hates being a man, would rather be a woman. This is the sort of "non-mainstream" character a person can really get behind, one whose intention is not to flaunt their otherness, make a show of their peculiarity, but simply to live and be happy.

The performance of Felicity Huffman as Bree is something of a tight-rope act; we watch it with the same fascination as a circus attendee craning their neck at the wack-job on the wire trying to balance a chair on their nose. We want to see her pull it off, but are morbidly attracted to the hope that she will fall and break her neck - either way we get our money's worth. Huffman gets through the movie with her vertebrae intact. She manages the trick of playing a role that's heavy on technique, outward mannerism, unique body language, without turning into a walking robot, a hollow Streepian acting clinic. Bree is a man who wants to be a woman who sometimes forgets she's trying to be a woman and reverts to being a man; Huffman plays her with a particular consciousness of movement, the sense of someone who's still learning how to control their body, still has to check the manual to know which button to push. She walks like she's trying to hold an egg between her legs, swings one arm in a bizarre parody of lady-like poise (she's always trying to keep her poise, avoid being exposed as a fraud), but in moments of stress she sits with her knees apart. Bree is a work-in-progress; her entire life has been an act of self-invention. She went to college not for a degree but to acquire intellectual refinement (she studied geology, had no intention of using it), views gender-reassignment as the final act of becoming. It's a protracted adolescence; the movie is not about self-discovery as much as maturation, the passage from childhood awkwardness into adult confidence. Bree acquires a stronger sense of herself by interacting with her long-lost son, Toby (Kevin Zegers), whom she rescues from jail, takes on the road with her, hides the truth from, squabbles with, admonishes to eat his vegetables and not do drugs (she has the nagging part down at least).

Huffman's performance is not a suck-the-air-out-of-the-scene performance; it's a delicate one, a balancing act of concealment and revelation. This is good news because the movie is too wispy and fragile to support anything stronger. The scenes are never anything special except for the way Huffman plays them, the extra zip the other, more naturalistic performers attain by being there with her. It's a pale sort of movie, a little wan, but energized by Huffman's focus, her proficiency, and not overwhelmed by her talent. Part of the balancing act is being able to play this strange, disjointed character, all mannerism and nose-bleed self-control, and still occupy the same space as the other characters believably. It's a well-directed movie in that Duncan Tucker has successfully blended different levels of performance into something more-or-less seamless, but Tucker is no budding cinema master. His movie is in danger of falling into the void of touchy-feeliness at any moment, becoming another earnest indie road-movie with nothing much to say. The best thing Tucker did was hire Huffman to play his character, help her correctly modulate her performance. Beyond this accomplishment, there isn't much to be said about Transamerica.