Thelma & Louise (1991) Review
9/10
A waitress and a housewife pack a car for two days in the mountains. Thelma brings a gun she does not know how to use because she is frightened of bears. Nothing after the first forty minutes is recoverable.
The 9 is for a screenplay that converts a genre almost perfectly. The road movie, the outlaw picture and the buddy film all have fixed shapes, and Khouri kept every beat and changed who was standing in them, and the change exposes what the shapes were always assuming.
The point I withhold is Harvey Keitel’s detective, who is written as the film’s decent man and functions largely to tell the audience how to feel. Keitel is excellent and the character is a safety valve.
The Parking Lot Changes Everything
Thelma is assaulted in a car park behind a roadhouse. Louise arrives with the gun, stops it, and the man makes the mistake of saying something as they walk away. She shoots him.
The scene is staged with almost no music and no slow motion. What happens next is the film’s actual subject: they sit in the car and Louise explains why they cannot go to the police, and the explanation is entirely convincing.
Thelma had been drinking, she had been dancing with him, there were witnesses to both, and the man is dead in a car park with a bullet in him after the assault had stopped. Louise understands exactly how that reads and she is right.
Everything after that is the consequence of a correct assessment. The film’s engine is not paranoia. It is two women accurately predicting the outcome of a legal process and choosing the road instead.
The reaction on release confirmed the point better than the film could have. A substantial body of commentary in 1991 described it as an attack on men, a fantasy of revenge, and evidence of something wrong with the culture, over a picture in which two people run away from a court system they do not trust. The volume of that response was itself an argument for the premise.
A protagonist who is right to flee is far stronger than one who panics. Give the reader the reasoning, let it hold up, and the whole subsequent plot becomes inevitable instead of foolish.
Khouri spends about ninety seconds on it and never returns to the argument. The characters do not relitigate the decision at intervals, which is the mark of a writer who trusts a scene she has already played.
The general point: your inciting incident is only as strong as your protagonist’s reason for not taking the obvious way out. Close that door properly once and you never have to defend it again.
Two Arcs Running Opposite Ways
Louise starts competent, contained and in charge, and comes apart across the film. Thelma starts helpless, apologetic and afraid of her own husband, and hardens into somebody who robs a shop and enjoys it.
They cross somewhere in the middle, which is the structure the whole film rests on. By the last act Thelma is making the decisions and Louise is following, and neither of them remarks on the reversal.
Sarandon plays Louise as somebody with a history she will not discuss, and the film respects that. Texas is mentioned, she refuses to drive through it, and the audience assembles what happened without a single line stating it.
Davis has the showier half and the harder job. Thelma’s transformation could easily read as a personality replacement, and Davis keeps a thread of the same woman running through it, so the person who holds up a shop is recognizably the person who packed a gun because of bears.
The robbery is where the crossing becomes visible. Thelma has watched J.D. describe how he does it, and she performs the whole thing back word for word, badly and with enormous conviction, while Louise stands outside not understanding what has happened to her friend. The film plays it for comedy and it is the most frightening scene in the picture.
The Men Are the Argument
Khouri gives almost every male character a different way of failing these women, and the range is what stops it being a lecture.
Darryl is a domestic tyrant played as a fool, which is the film’s funniest running joke and its sharpest observation. He is not frightening. He is ridiculous, and Thelma has organized her entire life around a ridiculous man because that is what she was told to do.
J.D. is charming, generous and steals everything, and the film gives Brad Pitt the role at twenty-seven and lets him be genuinely likeable so the theft lands. Michael Madsen’s Jimmy is decent and arrives too late with a ring, which is its own kind of uselessness.
The truck driver is the outlet. He shouts obscenities at them across three separate highway encounters, and when they finally stop and ask him to apologize he refuses, so they destroy his truck. It is the most cathartic thing in the film and the film knows it is a substitute for the thing they cannot do, which is why it arrives as late as it does and why the explosion it produces is so much larger than the offense that occasioned it in the first place.
When your theme requires a category of antagonist, differentiate them by mode of failure instead of by degree. A tyrant, a thief, a well-meaning fool and a stranger are four arguments. Four villains are one argument repeated.
Comedy protects a thesis. Darryl being funny is what allows the film to say something serious about him without the audience feeling instructed.
Give the reader one clean act of retribution. The tanker is not the point, and withholding it entirely would have made the film unbearable instead of angry.
Scott Shoots the Southwest as an Exit
About half the film was shot within roughly sixty miles of Moab, Utah, in the summer of 1990, and Adrian Biddle photographs the landscape as an increasing presence.
The progression is deliberate. Early scenes are interiors, a kitchen, a diner, a bar, all cramped and lit yellow. As they drive the frames open out until the last twenty minutes are almost entirely sky and rock with two small figures in a convertible.
Scott had come off Black Rain and was known for design-heavy studio pictures, and he built the production value here out of geography instead of construction. Sixteen and a half million dollars looks like far more because the money went into being somewhere.
The night driving sequences are the other achievement. Oil derricks, crop dusters and lit rigs in the dark, all shot as though the American landscape is beautiful and indifferent, which is exactly the tone the ending needs.
Hans Zimmer scored it early in his American career and stayed almost entirely out of the way. Long stretches use source music from car radios instead, so the film sounds like the inside of a vehicle, and the orchestral material is held back until there is nowhere left to drive.
The Ending Is Not Ambiguous
They drive off the canyon rim, the frame freezes and whites out, and the film ends. It has been read as tragic, triumphant, a suicide, an escape and a cop-out, and I think the film is clearer than the argument suggests.
Scott freezes the frame before the fall. That choice is the whole statement: the film declines to show the landing, so what the audience is left with is the decision and not the consequence.
It is also the only remaining option and the film has closed every other one carefully. Surrender means a trial neither of them will survive intact. Escape into Mexico requires driving through Texas, which Louise will not do for reasons the film never states aloud.
So the ending is a choice made freely by two people with full information, which is the first time in the film either of them has had that. That is why it plays as triumph even though it is plainly also a death.
Freezing before the consequence lets the audience keep the decision. Show the result and you have told them what to feel about it.
The precondition is closing the alternatives honestly. An ending only reads as inevitable if the reader has watched every other door shut for a reason they accepted at the time.
Note the ambiguity is about meaning and never about fact. Everybody knows what happens to the car. What stays open is what it was worth, which is the only kind of ambiguity that sustains thirty years of argument.
Should you watch Thelma & Louise?
Yes, and watch it as a comedy for the first hour. The film is remembered as a statement and it plays as two funny, frightened, badly prepared people making increasingly poor decisions, and the anger underneath it lands harder because of how much of it is genuinely light.
Frequently Asked Questions
This film appears on 3 of my film lists