Error handling in an ngResource action

Question

Is there any way to stop a transformResponse on an ngResource action from being called on a failed response. For example, the user resource here will look for data.user.firstname in the response even if the request fails and the response data doesn't have a user in it.

$resource("user", null, {
    login: {
        method: "POST",
        transformResponse: function(data) {
            return {
                given: data.user.firstname,
                family: data.user.lastname,
                email: data.user.email,
                type: data.user.type
            };
        }
    }
});

I can put some conditional logic in the transformResponse, but that seems like a hack more than what the angular team intended.