Like the best road movies, Thelma & Louise is drunk on recklessness, intent on seeing the open road as an escape hatch, even though it may end up being just another noose.Īs they run the gamut of American male loserdom en route - from the vicious would-be rapist to a caricatured clown of a chauvinist truck driver, with several easier-to-take if hardly more admirable types in between, including a slick hustler played by Brad Pitt on the verge of his career breakout - the film never simply sets up their adversaries to be offed, as most male excursions in this genre do. Even when initial larkiness gives way to something darker and more desperate after an ugly attempted rape and an act of violence that follows it, the film still sweeps you along. They floor it after thumbing their noses at Thelma's stifling fathead salesman and Louise's country'n'western Peter Pan. It's all gearbox as you're swept up in the exhilaration of their flight from small-town Arkansas drudgery in Louise's sea-green vintage T-Bird. It stands both genres on their heads not only by reversing the sexes, but by bringing to the rejiggering a more mature, more emotionally generous outlook than these movies usually get when guys propel them.Īnd do they ever propel! There's no sign of a soapbox here.
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Its dynamite protagonists - Geena Davis's Thelma, trapped in a marriage too small for her, and Susan Sarandon's Louise, spinning her wheels waiting tables in a coffee shop while waiting for a commitment-phobic boyfriend to marry her - breathe new life into two classic American movie genres: the existential road movie and the outlaw buddy movie. If America is about self-reinvention and finding yourself amid the wide-open spaces on either side of a beckoning road, Thelma & Louise (1991) is a quintessentially American movie - twice over.
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