Louise Sawyer: Where do you get off behaving that way with women you don't even know, huh? How'd you feel if someone did that to your mother or your sister or your wife?
THELMA & LOUISE is the latest in the new genre of "female buddy movies." The movie is pretty strong, the acting is quite wonderful and I recommend it.
Thelma (Geena Davis) is a repressed housewife, and Louise (Susan Sarandon) is a more-worldly waitress who decide to go fishing one weekend. The chemistry between these women is terrific from the beginning as they take a silly picture of one another as they jump in the car, Louise's '65 Mustang convertible.
Thelma, sick to death of her dorky husband, suggests they stop for a drink, and they stop at a divey bar with loads of CW music and loads of pseudo-cowboys. One of them, Harlan, takes notice of Thelma, dances with her as she gets drunk, then takes her out to the parking lot to "not hurt her" as Thelma protests in drunken and fruitless ways. But Louise comes to the rescue, threatens Harlan with a gun, and winds up shooting him when he mouths off to her one time too many. (A pity Louise was rather drunk at the time ... she could have shot him in a more appropriate location!)
The movie really picks up from here, as Thelma and Louise try to stay several steps in front of the law. The men are not all cookie-cutter creeps, like Harlan and Daryl (Thelma's husband). Louise's boyfriend Jimmy is alternately sweet and considerate, yet violent at times. Slocum, the man sent to investigate Harlan's murder, is fascinated by the women, because everyone who has seen the women insist they aren't the murdering kind. Thelma blossoms in the course of the movie, becoming someone who won't take shit from anyone. And all Louise can see is getting to Mexico, while avoiding Texas...
The photography is pretty good, and there's a neat sequence of driving through the New Mexico desert at night, the world quiet and dark except for the car lights flashing off the rock formations.
I rate this movie as either a 7 or 8 on the Chuck scale. Go see it!
A few words on the ending. Yep, there are spoilers. I have mixed feelings on the ending. On the one hand, even trying to talk to the cops would have been pointless. On the other hand, driving into the canyon rather than compromising somewhere seemed overly strong. I agree with an earlier poster who observed that showing some earlier scenes from their escapades was an attempt to soften the ending, and wasn't appropriate.
By : Laurie Mann
Source: rec.art.movies.reviews newsgroup
Rating: 0
THELMA AND LOUISE is a film by Ridley Scott and stars Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon as the title characters.
THELMA AND LOUISE is a great film, undoubtedly one of the ten best films that will be released in 1991, a film that may well find a place on the 100-best list of films I have ever seen. I kid you not.
However, if you don't know already, the advertising campaign is very misleading, giving many people the impression that THELMA AND LOUISE is a light-headed road picture, a kind of Hope and Crosby with breasts. This is a very black comedy, and whether one finds it ultimately depressing or uplifting is going to be a very personal reaction.
Myself, I was enormously cheered by this movie, especially by its blackness, by its anger and rage, and by its absolute insistence on a certain kind of life.
The film looks like a Ridley Scott film, with its black wet streets, but it feels more personal than more of his that I've seen.
Geena Davis is absolutely marvelous as Thelma, who begins as a kind of girl-woman running away from home on a spree and who ends up a human being, a woman who knows herself and the world, a woman in control, a woman willing to make a decision, a commitment. That mobile face, that almost prehensile mouth are exploited here to their full potential. Davis pulls out all the stops to create her Thelma and it works.
However, good as Davis is, Susan Sarandon may be even better. In some ways her character is more complex because so much about Louise remains a mystery she won't talk about. First she's the mother, then the daughter, then the sister, the partner to Thelma, and through it all is strength and knowledge that win through to acceptance. It's a powerful characterization and one that shines even more brightly when one realizes that Sarandon also has to be Davis's second banana, her straight woman. Davis gets most of the laughs. Sarandon got my heart.
I'd like to see both women get Oscar nominations. I think some people are going complain about a certain one-sidedness in the men's roles. It's true that Thelma's husband is the one of the most astonishing pig to ever pop a brew, it's true the foul-mouthed trucker is only technically a hominid, it's true the trooper is a Hitler Youth with shit in his britches. But Louise's boyfriend, without being an Alan-Alda sensitive guy, is a real mensch, and I suspect the cop who's heading the investigation (Harvey Keitel) falls in love with both women even while having to catch them.
There is some silliness in the movie. For example, no one ever seems to have heard of shrapnel or everyone carries a personal force field in case of exploding tanker trailers. And another poster has caught a continuity error. For some reason, I almost never catch these.
And you may, or may not, have a problem with the conclusion THELMA AND LOUISE comes to about women in a male-dominated society. I think the inevitability of what happens makes ideological concerns largely to one side.
Another poster also addressed the derivativeness of the ending. This is not a problem for me. The fact that THELMA AND LOUISE is about *women* makes that other movie's ending beside the point, too. In fact, if you want to talk about antecedents, let's talk about Goldie Hawn's wonderful SUGARLAND EXPRESS. That is the movie that THELMA AND LOUISE most resembles for me.
Honestly, Davis and Sarandon are so overwhelming, any objections pale to mere bagatelles in my humble opinion.
