Thelma (Without Louise)

 

Old age is not for sissies. That’s one of the lessons taught by the new indie film, Thelma, which is now delighting cineplex audiences. It’s far less fanciful than The Old Man & the Gun,  the 2018 caper film that starred an octogenarian Robert Redford as an ageing bank robber with no desire to go straight. In Thelma, the challenges of negotiating one’s advanced years are not minimized, at the same time that the leading lady (93-year-old June Squibb) shows just how resourceful an angry grandma can be.

 Thelma, it seems, has a close relationship with her grandson, a 20-something slacker who adores her but has not yet figured out the whole process of adulting. When a phone call tells her that he’s been in a terrible accident and that she needs to cough up the big bucks to clear his name, she doesn’t hesitate to comply. It’s a scam, of course, but she doesn’t take lightly the fact that she’s been both fooled and robbed of $10,000 in cash, which she delivered (as instructed) to a P.O box. Revenge is definitely on her mind.

 Thelma, at 93, is a recent widow, one who’s still capable of managing her tidy home. She’s well-equipped with the tools of modern living—a cellphone and a laptop computer—but their more sophisticated functions tend to boggle her nonagenarian mind. (Honestly, I do sympathize.) Online banking, for one thing, seems far beyond her abilities, but in the course of this film she’ll need to gather her wits about her, and learn to seek help wherever she can find it.

 This latter point is key: through most of the film, Thelma is so convinced of her own abilities that she disdains asking anyone for assistance. Certainly her easily frazzled daughter (Parker Posey) and her acerbic son-in-law (Clark Gregg) are too busy worrying about her physical and mental state to be much help. As she’s soon to discover, most of her old friends are dead or incapacitated: one still lives independently, but seems unaware that her large old house is infested with roaches. An unexpected source of strength is Ben, a former travel companion who now (since the death of his wife) makes his home in an assisted living facility, where he is starring as Daddy Warbucks in an in-house production of Annie. He’s played by the charmingly mellow Richard Roundtree: the film first screened after his 2023 death (at age 81) from pancreatic cancer. Roundtree is, of course, best known for his iconic title role in the 1971 blaxploitation hit, Shaft. In Thelma he’s no longer a tough guy who’s quick on the trigger, but he still remains unforgettable. And he and Squibb play off of one another—sometimes amiably, sometimes testily—like the old pros they are.

 But in many ways the key relationship in Thelma is that between the title character and her grandson, winningly portrayed by young Fred Hechinger. The love between them is easy to see, as is the faith they feel in each other’s smarts. Writer/director Josh Margolin unabashedly modeled the title character after his own magnificently feisty Grandma Thelma, who once almost fell for a similar scam. Says Margolin, ‘I wanted to explore her fight for what’s left of her autonomy just as I was beginning to consider mine.” He chose an action drama of sorts because “as far as I’m concerned, watching my grandma get onto a high mattress is as thrilling and terrifying as Tom Cruise driving a motorcycle off a cliff.” The real Thelma, glimpsed in the film’s coda, is now 103 years young.