PART OF ME, PART OF

Thirty years on, ‘Thelma & Louise’ still hits

BY MICHAEL J. CASEY

The women are on the run. One is a sheltered housewife married to a pig of a man. The other is a waitress hiding from her past. Both are wanted in connection with a murder outside an Arkansas honky-tonk, and neither is going back for nothing or nobody. “I wanted to write a movie about what the world looked like from the front seat,” Callie Khouri said of the script years later.

Written by Khouri and directed by Ridley Scott, Thelma & Louise is a touchstone of American cinema. Released in May 1991, Thelma & Louise became a commercial hit and a critical target, with many praising the movie out of one corner of their mouth while condemning it out the other. Misogyny was the case they gave Thelma & Louise, though watching the movie 30-plus years later, you can’t help but notice that that criticism says more about the early-1990s than the film itself.

Pulling on the threads of the road movie and the Western, two of America’s iconic genres, Thelma & Louise explores two women on similar paths separated by time and consequence. Louise (Susan Sarandon) is the elder of the two and acts maternal toward Thelma (Geena Davis). Louise has a past: Something happened when she lived in Texas, and she refuses to discuss it. It’s never spelled out, but when Harlan (Timothy Carhart) tries to rape Thelma in a parking lot, Louise pulls a gun and shoots Harlan where he stands. The look in her eyes tells you she’s been here before and knows the way.

The shooting spurs Thelma and Louise and their aquamarine 1966 Ford Thunderbird toward Mexico, with lead investigator Hal (Harvey Keitel) trying to bring them in safely before the trigger-happy boys in blue find them. Along the way, Thelma and Louise cross paths with a repugnant truck driver (Marco St. John), an impossibly good-looking and charismatic thief (Brad Pitt) and a state trooper (Jason Beghe) who folds like a cheap table. With each interaction, Thelma and Louise find something inside them they always suspected existed but never had the conviction to pull out. “I know it’s crazy, but I believe I have a knack for this shit,” Thelma says. “I believe you do,” Louise replies.

Digitally restored and available on 4K UHD and Blu-ray from The Criterion Collection, Thelma & Louise is a movie you must see again.

Thirty years on, it still feels fresh, relevant and triumphant — or at least as triumphant as a movie with this sort of ending can get. If they remade it today, it would probably do good business. Hopefully, they won’t: This one rings as true now as it did then.