New at BOP: Review: Matrix Resurrections Movie Review: Moonfall Movie Reviews: Scream The #1 Movie in America November Forecast The Many Saints of Newark October Forecast New Trivia Question All site updates Share & Save   Tweet Print this column

It's no secret that Thelma is an idiot. While she certainly did not deserve Harlan Puckett, it becomes increasingly difficult to feel sorry for her past that point. That's because the whole story almost entirely depends on her making a series of such impossibly boneheaded decisions that you almost want to throw up. And while we could debate whether or not Louise's initial decision to avoid the police was the right one, she at first seems to have her head on straight. But it isn't long before she inexplicably puts their fate entirely in Thelma's hands at a critical point in the movie. She even goes so far as to verbally emphasize, as she walks out of frame, how important it is that Thelma not screw things up.

So of course, Thelma screw things up.

The story comes perilously close to undermining any sympathy we might have for the girls by so thoroughly underscoring their stupidity. But this is mitigated somewhat by the fact that the majority of the male characters are cartoonish, disgusting louts. Not only do Thelma and Louise live in a world where everything event is a deus ex machina, but everyone – and I mean everyone - with a “Y” chromosome is an ape. The only exceptions are Louise's boyfriend Jimmy, and Detective Hal Slocumb (Harvey Keitel), the police detective who is on their trail. Both men are critical to the story, because they are central to some of it's most dubious contrivances.

Jimmy is abiding and understanding to the point of seeming daft. Slocumb is the worst cop in the world, developing an almost maternal interest in the plight of two murder suspects he's never met, goldbricking with them over the phone, letting them in on the details of his case and all but adopting them as his own children. It's as though Callie Khouri's script wants us to believe there's only two kinds of men in the world - pigs, and the ones who will watch Oprah with you and paint your toenails whole you share a good cry together.

It's utterly preposterous.

But if you step back and look objectively, Thelma & Louise is a largely symbolic story. It rains a lot in this world, but either intentionally or because they filmed in a place where the sky sputters fifteen inches a year, they hauled in water machines. The net effect renders every storm a sunshower, implying that proverbial silver lining your mother always told you about. As the women hustle from Arkansas toward Mexico in their convertible, they make the puzzling decision to avoid passing through Texas. Ostensibly, this is because Louise's dark past lurks there. But it also allows them to pass through New Mexico and Arizona, and the sweeping desert vistas there lend the movie the majestic, open feel of a John Ford western.

Rather than film at dawn or dusk, Ridley Scott plants giant spotlights in the desert to unnaturally accentuate the rock formations at night, and the light effects most films use to film car interiors at night are highly exaggerated here. As the two fugitives resort to robbery and violence to sustain themselves, they stop being women and become giants, from the way they act to the way the scenes are filmed. Everything about Thelma & Louise is larger than life hyperbole, like the tall tales your grandfather once told you. This isn't a movie, it's a fable. It's a ballad. It's doesn't quite venture into Raising Arizona territory, but there's no way you should mistake this movie for anything but allegory.

Thelma and Louise are living representations of the need to take your life into your own hands and stop letting events around you dictate who you are and what your fate will be. The implication is that if we fail to meet the future head on, it will come looking for you, and you might not like what it brings with it. Louise allowed a tragedy in her past to prevent her from taking her relationship with Jimmy where they both wanted it to go. Thelma let her fear of failure make her weak and submissive. And when the future came looking for them, it wasn't what they wanted or expected. But in the movie's famous, final climactic scene, for the first time in their lives, both women are truly masters of their domain.

Continued:       1       2       3