Thelma & Louise (1991) Review
9/10
Official trailer
A waitress and a housewife pack a car for two days in the mountains. Thelma brings a gun she doesn’t know how to use because she’s 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.
Few films get under my skin like this one. It’s funnier than its reputation and angrier than its jokes, and Davis and Sarandon are so easy together that I’d believe they’d known each other forever before the first scene. I’d put this screenplay up against anything from its decade. The point I withhold is Harvey Keitel’s detective, who’s 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 can’t 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’s right.
Everything after that’s the consequence of a correct assessment. The film’s engine is two women accurately predicting the outcome of a legal process and choosing the road instead.
That car scene is what I admire most in the whole script. Louise lays out exactly how a jury will see it, and I find myself agreeing with her line by line and wishing I didn’t.
The reaction on release confirmed the point better than the film could have. A considerable 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 don’t trust. The volume of that response was itself an argument for the premise.
A protagonist who’s right to flee is far stronger than one who panics. Give the reader the reasoning, let it hold up, and the whole later plot becomes inevitable instead of foolish. Khouri spends about ninety seconds on it and never returns to the argument. The characters don’t relitigate the decision at intervals. That’s the mark of a writer who trusts a scene she’s 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. That’s 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 won’t 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 it all 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’s the most frightening scene in the picture.
Davis is the reason this film is a 9 for me. The robbery is funny because she’s so pleased with herself, and it’s frightening for exactly the same reason, and I can’t think of another performance that pulls off both at once in a single scene.
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. That’s the film’s funniest running joke and its sharpest observation. He’s not frightening. He’s ridiculous, and Thelma has organized her entire life around a ridiculous man because that’s 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 likeable so the theft lands. Michael Madsen’s Jimmy is decent and arrives too late with a ring. That’s 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’s the most cathartic thing in the film and the film knows it’s a substitute for the thing they can’t do. That’s 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 isn’t 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. That’s 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’s nowhere left to drive.
I wish more composers had that restraint. The radio music makes the trip feel like I’m riding in the back seat, and when the orchestra finally shows up near the end, it arrives with real weight.
The Ending Is Not Ambiguous
They drive off the canyon rim, the frame freezes and whites out, and the film ends. It’s 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’s 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 won’t do for reasons the film never states aloud.
So the ending is a choice made freely by two people with full information. That’s the first time in the film either of them has had that. That’s why it plays as triumph even though it’s plainly also a death.
Freezing before the consequence lets the audience keep the decision. Show the result and you’ve told them what to feel about it.
The precondition is closing the alternatives properly. 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. That’s 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 worse and worse decisions, and the anger underneath hits harder because so much of it is light. It’s a 9 and not a 10 only because Keitel’s detective keeps turning up to tell me how to feel, and this film never needed the help.
