Part of me wants to soften a review when it becomes clear that some of the script is a found poetry exercise in which the director, writer, and editor (all x) is borrowing from his own grandmother’s dialogue.
Thelma kind of fits in the emerging genre of movies that I think one could label “Old People Want to Be in Movies Too” like Red (2010), The Visit (2015), and X (2022). In those movies, old people want to do spying, see their grandchildren, and have sex just like the rest of us, and Red is probably the most similar in substance if not style.
Similar, because Thelma is a kind of satire of spy/action movies complete with the walking away from an explosion scene, the car chase as motorized scooter chase, tracking devices, subterfuge, capture, and the rest.
June Squibb is 94 and she plays a character, Thelma, who is 94, which is just amazing. Kind of reminds me of Nebraska (2013) and how it made people think that Bruce Dern might be on death’s door.
The cast is kind of insanely supercharged. Thelma’s love interest is Shaft, Parker Posey (Beau is Afraid, but also Louie), Agent Coulson is the dad, Fred Hichinger who plays the eternally hangdog tech-obsessed, spiritually-reborn, possibly sexually-dexterous brother from Season 1 of White Lotus but also Eighth Grade.
The thing that I took away from seeing this movie more than anything else is that the script it written and directed in such a way that everyone is allowed to smirk at the jokes as they’re saying the lines, which totally wins me over. It’s sort of like the magic of watching an improvised scene in a Judd Apatow movie, where everyone is just egging each other on to break character in a scene. Thelma in this respect is the straight man of the script, taking herself seriously, but taking everyone else at just about the right level of serious relative to her capabilities. Thelma is self aware of the genre it’s satirizing and never ventures too deeply into schmaltz which makes it a perfectly acceptable recommendation for just about anyone if you’re willing to look past the knee jerk reaction to seeing a movie whose title character is a nonagenarian.
