Hayden Panettiere Movie:

Editorial Review:
As Roy (Tom Wilkinson, In the Bedroom) and Irma (Jessica Lange, Cape Fear, Tootsie) celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary, Roy passes out. While meeting with their pastor, Roy reveals that he's a woman trapped in a man's body, and he wants to get a sex change--setting in motion a complex and emotionally fraught conflict between husband and wife, individual and community, and parent and child. Normal explores Roy's gender dysphoria with empathy, but also has an eye for the social and familial absurdities that come up. The humor, far from trivializing the issue, steers it away from cloying sentiment or politically correct sanctimony. The movie captures the confusion of Roy's friends and coworkers with realism and without judgment, and the stressful changes of Roy and Irma's relationship aren't sugarcoated or made into a moral lesson. Both Lange and Wilkinson are superb, as are the skillful script and direction. --Bret Fetzer

Normal [Region 2] Reviews:
A bit Awkward for everyone
2009-11-12 - For a made for television low-budget movie, the actors wrung a lot of truth out of a story that may or may not have reflected the actual physical process of a man becoming a woman.
The reason the movie was made was because of the tabloid appeal of the main idea. The portrayals of middle American people was more accurate than most of us would like to imagine. They are frightened of anything new, programmed to hate at the drop of an epithet and betray the fact that our educational system is more about entrenched teacher cadres than about awakening any pursuit of truth and knowledge. I don't like to think that we are really that close to the "My Name is Earl" mentality, but I think that we are.

Instructional
2009-05-12 - As an entertainment item, this video falls short except for those of voyeuristic bent. As an instructional treatise, this video lends reference to those of the community trying to "break the ice" and express their feelings to loved ones. For this latter category, I highly recommend this DVD. But be aware, as Irma (Jessica) points out, 'reading reference is frivolous and unproductive.' Those who don't want education will refuse to accept it.

The Most Amazing Love Movie
2009-01-28 - The tittle express Its most.
This is the most amazing love movie I've ever saw.
It's about being loved the way you are no matter how hard you'll gonna have to fight for It.
I do recommend, watch It.


Truly Normal
2008-12-20 - I just finished watching this movie, and I am surprised to say that I was truly impressed. Normal succeeds where movies like Transamerica have failed, in my opinion. Its awkward, its painful, its hard to watch - or it was for me - but its all of these things because it is a vivid reflection of the real conflict and confusion that transsexuality can create in the lives of those who are born to it and those who come to it through the love of others.

It doesn't throw out theories or try to explain the condition, but there is enough information, cleverly and naturally interwoven into the fabric of the story to give a cursory education about the subject matter. Most of the important questions are asked and answered with care. It doesn't focus on a clinical view, but gives a warm and thoughtful human perspective, dealing with the feelings of everyone involved: the transsexual, her family, and her community. There is a lot of beauty in the way many of the situations are handled and a lot of reality in the way many issues are never really resolved.

It doesn't sugar coat things, but it does suggest that love and hope are critical elements in the healing that everyone touched by this condition needs.

Personally, I think it is very aptly titled, because it portrays everyone with an eye to the basic frailty of the human condition, showing as it unfolds that all of the characters are in fact just that: Normal.

The performances are great and the story is well written. I would recommend this film to anyone who is interested in a poignant human drama and to anyone interested in a serious and carefully crafted work on the subject of transsexuality.

An exploration of restraint, rejection, and freedom
2008-12-11 - An interesting study of the constraints and traps that we fall in to, and the change that occurs in our lives as we liberate ourselves from said pitfalls.

The beginning of the movie sees all the central characters (husband, wife, and daughter) unhappy, confused, and rejecting of the others' roles in their lives: Husband with long-suppressed secret, having attempted to do everything he is told he should, suddenly experiences a reminder of his mortality, and decides to become true to what his heart says; wife, facing menopause and the lack of involvement with outside life, unknowing of how to handle a world that has changed while she has grown old; daughter, just becoming a woman, questioning why she must conform to the now-outdated beliefs of her mother.

Other characters come in to play, all of whom are shown (or hinted) to be caught or rebelling against the patterns previously established in their lives: The son, rejecting his "breadbasket"/farmer upbringing for a city/music life; the boss, dominated and emasculated by all the women in his life, incredibly masculine but denied the ability to be (his wife is sterile, but blames him; she disapproves of his calluses, so makes him buff them; a hinted-at lifetime of abuse that has left him apologetically deferential); the grandfather, insistent on his son taking over the farm, haunted by abuse from his own father, "plagued" by the dominant women in his life-yet sobbing for his mother.

On the whole, I found this to be an excellent exploration of the bravery it takes to become yourself: to be in a miserable situation and do nothing is both easier socially yet more traumatic mentally; while instituting change and improving your lot frees the spirit, but is usually much more difficult socially and culturally.