THELMA & LOUISE Directed by Ridley Scott; Screenplay by Callie Khouri
The '60s gave us Bonnie and Clyde, Butch and Sundance. The '70s gave us The Sugarland Express and Badlands. Maybe one of the troubles with the '80s was that its movies were singularly lacking in truly memorable outlaw couples. Thelma & Louise is a sign that things are looking up in the '90s.
Ridley Scott's movie pays direct, imagistic homage to at least three of these predecessors. And first-time writer Callie Khouri remains true to convention in two important respects: her road-running pair are lovably eccentric; and they are, in the largest sense, innocents. The uncomprehending world may see them as the dangerous perpetrators of a colorful crime spree. We, however, are encouraged to understand them not as public enemies but as public victims. It's an unfeeling society that is really responsible for their wicked deeds.
But the title clearly announces the film's most significant innovation. Thelma & Louise is the first important movie to plop two women in a car and send them careering down open Western roads with the cops in wheel-spinning pursuit. And it is the first movie to use sexism as the motivating force for their misdeeds.
It starts out larkishly enough. Thelma (Geena Davis) needs a respite from her traditionally male, that is to say, endlessly oinking, husband, and Louise (Susan Sarandon) is tired of waiting for her musician boyfriend to return from his one-night gigs in Ramada Inn cocktail lounges. A weekend at a friend's mountain cabin sounds just right.
Until, at their first pit stop, everything starts to go all wrong. For there they encounter a guy named Harlan (Timothy Carhart), who thinks buying a woman a drink entitles him to something more than flirtatious conversation. When he tries to rape Thelma in the parking lot, Louise kills him -- cold-bloodedly, after he has unhanded her friend. You see there is something dark, something the film never fully explains, in her past.
The only decent male the pair encounter is Hal (Harvey Keitel), the detective leading the chase. Mostly they come across a lunatic variety of hunks and lunks. When the men are not sexually objectifying or exploiting the ladies, they are ripping them off. A convenience-store bandit absconds with their getaway money, but not before teaching Thelma the tricks of his trade. "I feel I've got a knack for this," she muses after knocking over her first grocery store.
Davis and Sarandon certainly have a knack for playing this relationship. Davis emerges from repression to self-confidence with a joyous air of self- astonishment, while Sarandon takes a trip in the opposite direction. At the beginning, she's all cool confidence, the practical brains of their jerry- built organization. By the end, life has taught her a thing or two about just how provisional it can be.