Ridley Scott (1991)
Thelma (Geena Davis), a thirtyish Arkansas housewife, and Louise (Susan Sarandon), her fortyish fast-food waitress friend, drive out of town for a weekend in the mountains. They stop off in a bar en route. When a man they meet there tries to rape Thelma, Louise shoots him dead and the women have to change their travel plans – they head for a new life across the Mexican border. This Ridley Scott film is dynamic and absorbing throughout but it gets progressively less enjoyable: it’s not just the eponymous friends who are attempting to escape from the police and various male tyrannies. The imaginative actresses playing Thelma and Louise are trying to free themselves from the clutches of the shrewdly despicable (Oscar-winning) script. They fail, inevitably but heroically: Susan Sarandon does well and Geena Davis is phenomenal but it’s the writer, Callie Khouri (also an executive co-producer of the film), who is in the driving seat all along.
Thelma and Louise has been hailed as innovative in featuring a pair of female leads in extremis and taking the law into their own hands while the male characters are dimly, demeaningly stereotyped. Callie Khouri’s achievement is rather in recognising that the road/buddy movie is pretty reliable at the box office – and that a ‘feminist’ version of the genre is likely to prove most commercial if (a) the men are presented as risibly incompetent and (b) the tough, funny, credible women remain underdogs, essentially and eventually victims of man’s inhumanity to woman. (That Thelma and Louise are tough, funny and credible is thanks mainly to Davis and Sarandon although, to be fair to Khouri, she has supplied some sharp wisecracking dialogue.) The heroines, in charge but under threat, hardly come into direct contact with the main institutional and individual exemplars of crass masculine society – respectively the police and Thelma’s petty tyrant of a husband (unfunnily played by Christopher McDonald). But the treatment of the men with whom the two principals do interact exposes the film-makers’ intentions. This is most striking in the case of the best male performance – from Brad Pitt, as JD, the amiable, insouciant cowboy thief with whom Thelma enjoys an exhilarating one-night stand. It would be fine if this was as much as we got of JD but, since he’s an attractive man, he must, on the film’s terms, be up to no good. Next morning he steals the life savings that Louise has (puzzlingly) entrusted to Thelma for safe keeping. When JD reappears later in police custody, Brad Pitt’s naturalness has gone: a charming but slender character is being milked dry in order to make a gender politics point.
This doesn’t quite happen with the more ridiculous macho fools whose function is to illustrate the two women’s changing feelings but the scenes involving these men make you uncomfortable in a different way. Thelma and Louise encounter a lone patrol cop (who is nothing to do with the main pack of pursuers). He (Jason Beghe) is cool and sinister in black uniform and shades but the heroines reduce him to a terrified, humiliated cry baby. They hijack a stupid, leering trucker (Marco St John) whom they’ve kept meeting on the road. Once out of his driver’s cab, this man is played as such a gibbering idiot that you feel he’s hardly responsible for his sexually offensive behaviour or capable of outraging the women after they’ve seen what he’s really like. Up to this point, they have been more or less forced to break the law. The cretinous trucker isn’t worth the trouble of terrorising at gunpoint so you have to accept that Louise is now simply as trigger-happy as she claims to be (‘I’m getting to like this …’). What’s especially unsettling is the film’s infallible knack of combining this kind of ‘character development’ with easy laughs – the more unfazed by lawbreaking the women become, the more easily is the viewer expected to sympathise with them. By the last half-hour, Scott and Khouri are well into Butch-and-Sundance-ising Thelma and Louise. (The details of the death-defying climax here are just about interchangeable with those in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid – even if the literally over the top emotional uplift of Thelma and Louise’s final image is very different.)
You expect a Ridley Scott movie to have visual éclat but less in the way of strong characters: this one has both and the combination is often exhilarating, especially in the opening section, when Thelma and Louise are getting ready for their weekend trip. (It’s too bad that it’s so briefly a trip before it turns into a political mission.) Once the killing has happened, Scott’s direction never quite regains its initial friendly effervescence but the film is always interesting to look at. Scott’s science-fiction background and British outsider’s viewpoint combine to help him present the scale and variety of the landscape as luminous and awesome: wherever Thelma and Louise go seems impregnated with shimmering potential – it’s a vivid illustration of the physical and mental terra nova that they’re discovering. (The cinematography is by Adrian Biddle.) Hans Zimmer’s vibrant, slightly sinister score fits both the look of the film and the tone of the rock songs sounding out of the women’s car.
But what makes Thelma and Louise a successful entertainment for so long are the two leads. The contrasts between their characters correspond satisfyingly with the different styles of the actresses playing them, although there’s a connection between Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon too – they spark each other’s performance. We soon see that, while Louise has a clenched determination to enjoy her weekend away, Thelma, as soon as she’s out of the house, is more exuberantly transported. This difference is reinforced by the fact that Sarandon, although very likeable, is somewhat constricted compared with Davis. This is particularly noticeable when Louise is experiencing moments of liberation: in these, Sarandon’s hair may be windblown but her sense of abandon feels willed. The crucial trauma in Louise’s past that’s eventually disclosed makes sense of Sarandon’s lack of freedom but that lack is still too persistent. There’s a scene in which Louise wanders out into a hushed nightscape and Sarandon, with her beautifully exophthalmic eyes, looks into the sky with keen, hopeful apprehension. The moment doesn’t quite work because Sarandon is working too hard to show that a new and surprising future is revealing itself in Louise’s surroundings.
There’s nothing studied about Geena Davis’s acting: long-limbed and radiantly zany, she goes beyond the eccentric, honest charm which won her an Oscar in The Accidental Tourist (1988). There are so many highlights in what she does here: the thrilled, resonant warmth and power of her laughter in the bar scenes; her convincing shock when Louise shoots Thelma’s attacker; her grinning, sauntering entry into breakfast at a motel after her night with the cowboy (it’s as if she’s simultaneously still experiencing sexual pleasure and laughing at the memory of it). The love interlude with JD is obviously prepared for and you wonder how Davis will bring it off – it’s only twenty-four hours since the attempted rape. But her look of anticipation – wary and avid – as Thelma opens her motel room door to JD is perfectly believable. As they lie in bed together and he tells her about his stick-ups, her awed, tender curiosity about his inconceivable lifestyle (and body – which she also regards as beyond her wildest dreams) is magnetically humorous.
Half-crying, half-laughing routines may be easy to make an impact with but Davis is amazing in a scene in which Thelma recollects how Louise killed the would-be rapist: as she tries to be jokey, the horror of what happened keeps bursting through. She repeatedly (as does Sarandon) redeems feeble gags through her taste and her timing. Davis is credible even when, near the end of the film, Thelma tells Louise that she’s ‘crossed over’ (that is, she’s traversed a spiritual border – rather than the physical one into Mexico). You believe from Geena Davis’s face that Thelma is transformed. It’s great to watch and enjoy her relaxed, rangy movement and pure emotional expressiveness. Perhaps what’s best of all about this wonderful performance is that, as you recollect it, it seems to transcend the major shortcomings of Thelma and Louise.
Michael Madsen plays Jimmy, Louise’s moody, dissatisfied boyfriend. Madsen seems a little unsure but this helps to make his characterisation less obvious than the ones from most of the other men in the cast – and Susan Sarandon is pleasantly, sadly relaxed and affecting in her scenes with him. Harvey Keitel’s conscientious interpretation of a vaguely well-meaning police chief is so much wasted energy: this dreary character makes little sense. Timothy Carhart is nastily effective as the man who chats up Thelma before trying to assault her.
[1990s]
