Thelma & Louise

It’s interesting when a movie blows up big enough to infiltrate pop culture for a bunch of years.  You’ll hear and see references to it everywhere so you’ll think this one’s gonna last forever.  But then five to ten years after the initial release it’s completely out of the public’s consciousness (until the sequel).  Speed and Avatar were like that.  Remember “pop quiz hot shot” and the Na’vi?  Thelma & Louise is in this category too.  If you weren’t around when it came out you have no idea how big it was at the time and how often that famous ending was mimicked and satirized.

Truth be told I never got around to it until now.  It had dogged me for decades that this picture about badass chicks doing badass shit kept getting bumped on my watch list and it would constantly go on and off streaming services.  Finally the stars aligned and I let it wash over me in a blissful moment of satisfaction.

Housewife Thelma (Gena Davis (The Fly)) and waitress Louise (Susan Sarandon (The Rocky Horror Picture Show)) decide to go on a weekend getaway to the mountains.  They never get the chance to do this because Thelma’s husband, Darryl (Christopher McDonald (Best of the Best 3)), is a self-absorbed possessive cheating asshole who won’t let her go anywhere (she skips town without telling him) and Louise is always working at the local diner.  They’re very giddy about the whole thing and can’t wait to let loose a bit.  Unfortunately when they make a pit stop for a few drinks at a bar a scumbag piece of shit takes advantage of a drunk Thelma and tries to rape her.  Louise forces him to back off at gunpoint and shoots him dead when he makes one disgusting remark too many.  Now the two of them are on the run and go from one awful situation to another as they make their way towards Mexico.

This entire thing hinges on the main characters.  Thelma is the happy go lucky child-like one who met her husband at fourteen and got married at eighteen.  The insinuation is she’s been sheltered most of her life and doesn’t have a lot of street smarts.  This contrasts with Louise who’s a bit more rough and tumble.  She isn’t married, works, smokes, doesn’t get fooled by the rapist’s charm when he first introduces himself and probably got raped herself in the past (it isn’t explicitly said).  They’re more or less opposites but you get the sense right away they’re really good friends even though it seems they haven’t known each other very long.  They get to learn about themselves and one another during the trip and their relationship develops into an unhealthy enabling codependency.  It’s didn’t have to be this way but their friendship becomes doomed as soon as Louise kills a dude and Thelma decides to stick by her side and not call the cops.  There’s no going back after that.

What’s weird though is the handling of the dark turn the characters take.  It happens too quick and too soon into the story.  There isn’t any buildup really which feels like a mistake.  And I think the escalation of the corrupt behavior and all consuming madness would’ve worked better if some scenes were rearranged.  Instead of the first incident being second degree murder they should’ve started with robbing the convenience store after all their cash is stolen, moved on to teaching a foul mouthed trucker a lesson by humiliating him and messing up his rig (blowing it up, even if it was an accident, is extreme) and then climaxing with the homicide of a rapist.  We don’t know enough about the characters to initially understand what’s behind the killing.  That’s why this event feels out of place at the start of the trip and I had a hard time getting on board with their plan to not only flee the scene of a crime and not tell the police but also escape to Mexico.

Spoiler for this paragraph.  That finale of Thelma and Louise driving off the cliff is the only way it could’ve ended so I’ll give full credit for making the right choice there.  They’re more free than they’ve ever been or ever will be in their lives and wouldn’t be able to tolerate anything less so suicide was an easy call to make.  Strangely the filmmakers must’ve thought it was too much of a downer so in an effort to lighten the scene as much as possible they fade to white as soon as the car plunges over the side of the rockface, an upbeat song plays and they cut to a montage of earlier scenes where the two of them are laughing and having a good time.  So they effectively removed most of the emotional weight the movie had been building up to that point.

But I wanna mention some positives.  As per usual with Ridley Scott (Black Rain) the picture looks great.  Adrian Biddle (Aliens, Judge Dredd, Event Horizon) does a fantastic job with framing, lighting and capturing the gorgeous American southwest landscape.  This is one of those where you can pause the film almost anywhere and have a beautiful shot to admire.

The casting is a huge part of the movie and Gena Davis and Susan Sarandon are excellent together.  You can tell they feed off each other’s excitement, sadness and anxiety.  Their personalities compliment and balance out nicely with Davis playing it naive and Sarandon being tougher at first.  But then there’s a shift where Davis becomes more take charge while Sarandon tries to keep up with the steep increase in immorality.  Even with my gripe above about the speed of these transitions Davis and Sarandon still successfully pull them off.

And while the entire supporting cast is very good (Harvey Keitel (Bad Lieutenant), Michael Madsen (Species II), Brad Pitt (The Tree of Life), Stephen Tobolowsky (Single White Female)) Christopher McDonald almost steals the show.  He’s such a doofus and a jerk and McDonald’s performance is so exaggerated you can’t help but love the guy.  I mean he’s a total slimeball who tries really hard to project strength but since he’s actually completely nutless it’s pretty damn funny to see him basically get his comeuppance in just about every scene he’s in.

Now I know I didn’t talk about feminism and how this film was a big deal for a lot of women but that’s because I’m out of my depth on that.  The only thing I can say is I don’t think we’d seen this type of female power duo before.  It was always a heterosexual couple going on a crime spree like in Bonnie and Clyde or Badlands.  And when it was a cunning group of women the circumstances were more innocent like dating guys only for their money in How to Marry a Millionaire or sticking it to your boss like in 9 to 5.  Thelma & Louise may have been a cathartic scream for many because it took the indecencies and crimes that have been done to women since the beginning of time and fought back against that terrible shit in an epic revenge fantasy.

I get why this movie was a massive hit.  However, the structure of the plot and the character development is off in my opinion.  Even with these issues it gets better the more I think about it.  Davis and Sarandon’s performances alone make this worth watching.