THELMA & LOUISE
With Susan Sarandon, Geena Davis, Harvey Keitel, Michael Madsen, Christopher McDonald, Stephen Tobolowsky, Brad Pitt, Timothy Carhart, and Lucinda Jenny.
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It’s questionable how much of the credit for this belongs to director Ridley Scott, whose production company made this movie. So far Scott has turned out one eye-popping cult movie, Blade Runner, which was substantially altered from his own cut, and several more or less forgettable features: two respectable genre exercises (Alien and Someone to Watch Over Me), a so-so literary adaptation (The Duellists), a fluffy department-store Christmas window display (Legend), and an offensive anti-Japanese thriller (Black Rain). He’s not exactly an auteur–this former director of commercials brings a stylish sense of lighting, framing, and monumentality to a variety of visual subjects, but he needs a good script as badly as a musician needs an instrument. He seems to have lucked out this time. Callie Khouri’s screenplay (her feature debut) and the performances of Davis and Sarandon provide him with both an engine and a body; he provides the snazzy paint job. In other words, without the stellar work of these three women, he’d be lost.
What this suggests to me is that Khouri knows something about the backgrounds of her heroines, who decide to take off on a two-day holiday in Louise’s T-bird convertible but before long wind up as fugitives from justice. Khouri knows how to write something juicy without too much showing off. The few fancy lines–“You could park a car in the shadow of his ass,” for example, or “I’ve always believed that if done properly, robbery doesn’t have to be an unpleasant experience”–are fully justified by the context. Equally important, she has an acute and very funny sense of the habits and attitudes of rustic males–car dealers, cops, truckers, musicians, and everyday sexist philanderers.
Once the film firmly establishes this process, it can gain some of its best poetic effects by suspending the plot without retarding the action–an effect also achieved by all the “road” works cited above. By this time, character has become action. Thelma & Louise can allow itself several short, magical, but apparently pointless detours that don’t slow down the pace or dissipate our involvement: a camera movement traverses the T-bird in motion, Scott taking full advantage of both the ‘Scope framing and his own capacity to fill it handsomely and dynamically; in a hilarious shot, Thelma’s husband Darryl and several policemen watch a Cary Grant movie on TV; one lovely sequence is devoted to a quiet rest stop in a prairie at night.
