Thelma & Louise
1991
Director: Ridley Scott
Starring: Susan Sarandon, Geena Davis, Harvey Keitel
Louise (Sarandon) is a waitress at a diner and Thelma (Davis) has a boor of a husband. The two plan a weekend getaway, but wind up shooting a would-be rapist, and then find themselves on the run. Their vacation morphs into something beyond their imagination as the two panic, grow desperate, then embrace their newfound lawlessness.
I feel like I’m a little late to the game with Thelma & Louise. I only just saw it for the very first time a few days ago, yet I knew the ending, mostly from The Simpsons episode where it was heavily parodied. I feel like Thelma & Louise is a cultural touchstone of the early 1990s, yet seeing it for the first time now, in 2012, it didn’t have the same kind of impact I was expecting. I enjoyed it, mostly for the feminism inherent in a story line like this, but I think it would have had greater effect on me had I seen it twenty years ago. Today, ass-kicking gun-toting females have, blessedly, become highly visible in action films. We have seen the Lara Crofts, the Alices, the Ziva Davids, and they have been proven capable of opening and carrying a film or television series. Prior to Thelma & Louise, there was Ripley and there was Sarah Connor in the Terminator films, and that pretty much taps me out of ass-kicking females. It’s not nearly as much of a “novelty,” for lack of a better word, to see women take charge anymore. I’m very grateful for that, but it does help explain why I wasn’t as blown away, pun intended, by Thelma & Louise as I was quite expecting.
