THELMA (2024) is a cute little comedy about a 93 year old lady (June Squibb, NEBRASKA) spending a couple days feeling like her life is an action movie. She’s widowed and lives on her own, but her very nice twenty-four-year-old grandson Danny (Fred Hechinger, EIGHTH GRADE) visits often, drives her places, helps her with checking her email and things.
Then one day she gets scammed by somebody who calls her pretending to be Danny in trouble. In fact Danny is fine, but sleeping in and not answering his phone, so she puts the whole family in a panic, and by the time they figure out what happened she’s already mailed ten thousand dollars cash to a p.o. box. The police can’t do anything except tell her don’t worry, you’re not the first to fall for this, and apparently “Zuckenborg” can’t even do anything even though they might’ve gotten her information from social media. She specifically asked about that.So she decides to take matters into her own hands. THE BEEKEEPER hadn’t come out yet, but Danny has shown her MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – FALLOUT, so that’s her inspiration. The filmatists didn’t train up Squibb to kick ass like Bob Odenkirk in NOBODY, but luckily she’s dealing with scammers almost as amateur as herself, so her simple plan is enough to find and confront them. Kind of like BUBBA HO-TEP, this movie is designed around old people being slow. The mission can’t be too complicated because we only have 98 minutes, and we need to account for travel time. She moves mostly by scooter, sometimes by asking for rides. She must evade the authorities (her family) and when she ditches her life alert bracelet it’s like Jason Bourne or somebody losing a tracker. But the driving bass lines and bongos on the score by Nick Chuba (Shōgun) sound more like an OCEAN’S ELEVEN heist.
Thelma has an incredible partner in her mission, Ben, played by the late great Richard Roundtree. He’s an old friend of her late husband Teddy. He seems more with it than her, but has no family left to check on him like she does, so he lives at a huge retirement community, which he hopes to return to by 8 pm since they’re doing Annie and he’s playing Daddy Warbucks. (He’s not fond of the old lady playing Annie.)
They sneak off, and Thelma’s family freaks out. Danny blames himself for losing track of her. His folks are played by Parker Posey (BLADE: TRINITY) and Clark Gregg (I LOVE TROUBLE), and they are comically passive aggressive helicopter parents making it all more stressful. There are comparisons to draw between flaky slacker Danny, who beats himself up about not knowing how to do anything properly, and Thelma, who is frustrated with the world treating her like she can’t do anything at all. Admittedly she needs lots of help with basic computer stuff, and fell for this dumb scam. But she’s tenacious and not ready to give up her independence.
By the way, Hechinger’s voice kept reminding me of Joaquin Phoenix, and then I found out he plays an emperor in GLADIATOR II. So I may not have been the only one to notice that.
During the end credits there’s a dedication to a real Thelma, seen in a car saying things that Squibb repeats in the movie. This confirmed my sense that it was inspired by writer/director Josh Margolin’s relationship with his grandma. He says she really fell for a scam like that but they stopped her before she sent the money, so he imagined what could’ve happened if they hadn’t. I think more importantly he seems to have based the character closely on his grandma’s personality, because the specificity and seeming authenticity of the things she says and does make them very funny. There’s a running gag that any time she passes another elderly person she thinks she knows them, stops and has a conversation where they list people they might know each other through until they determine that they do not in fact know each other and wish each other a nice day. This has to have been something he really witnessed.
And of course there’s the movie-inspired humor, like a “hacking in” scene that’s really just Danny explaining to her over the phone how to close a pop up window, and when she does it she says, “I’m in!” There are also some action movie shots like a part where they have a camera attached to a scooter as it rams another scooter. Adding such flair to something so small and down to earth makes it seem thrilling.
Squibb is really good in the movie – confused and stubborn in a way that’s more funny and relatable than depressing, I think. It’s a light-hearted movie but it does have room for some melancholy about things like running out of friends who are still alive, or who are losing their faculties, or realizing you never lived a certain way and are running out of time to do it. It’s a great gift for Squibb and for us to have this role built for a lovable 90-something year old, and it’s even more exciting to discover that shortly before he died Roundtree left us a legit performance like this. Not a celebrity cameo, not a nostalgic trotting out of the aging icon, but a real character that takes advantage of his age, his lived experience, and yes, that off-the-charts charisma that made him blow up in SHAFT. Not every actor of Roundtree’s stature gets a final film that respects them this much. But I guess that supports the movie’s (admittedly obvious) message that you just gotta keep living and trying to find things (and people) that make you happy while you’re still here.
December 10th, 2024 at 7:38 am
I dug this one. Squibb and Roundtree are great. I like how it turns seemingly mundane things into Mission: Impossible action sequences, like when she has to trudge up some stairs and climb up on the bed to retrieve something. And I like the note about how both her and her Gen Z grandson are infantilized by their family and society.
I had to look up the real Thelma– she’s still alive at 103, and I’m happy she got to see this. Also her husband Teddy was Ted Post, director of HANG ‘EM HIGH, MAGNUM FORCE, BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES, and THE BABY!
If you’re into the funny yet bittersweet tone of THELMA, I also have to recommend what is probably my favorite TV series of the year– A Man on the Inside (on Netflix). Created by Michael Schur of The Good Place, based on the movie THE MOLE AGENT, starring Ted Danson. It’s very funny and also kinda sad, about aging and loneliness and the spark of life. Very kind and humanistic. Stephen McKinley Henderson gets a good role, too.