A semi-regular favourite past-time of Hollywood is making cheap comedy out of elderly actors doing things that elderly people aren’t typically meant to do. Does anyone remember that Going in Style movie from several years back, about three old men pulling off a heist, or hell the 1979 movie it was a remake of. For a time, Betty White was the poster-woman of kindly old ladies being unexpectedly vulgar in pop culture. And of course there’s the whole Book Club movie phenomenon -movies about quartets of elder friends who engage with scandalous themes on sex or drugs or other such things they’re not ‘supposed’ to have interest in. And a movie like Thelma, which sells itself as an action-comedy, looks exactly like this kind of dull, borderline exploitative Hollywood trend. Except for one thing: it stars June Squibb.
Unlike the actors put front and centre of Going in Style or 80 for Brady, June Squibb does not have a level of immortal star power. In fact, she never even appeared in a movie until 1990 at the age of sixty-one. For six decades, most of them on stage, she’s been a reliable character actress, and not until Alexander Payne gave her a major role in his 2013 film Nebraska, for which she received an Oscar nomination, did she really take off as someone the industry began paying attention to. And so her being given a movie like Thelma means something a little different, and the movie is, delightfully, a little different itself.
Thelma Post is a 93 year-old Los Angeles senior, living on her own for a couple years after her husband died, loving but slightly resentful of how much she relies on her caring grandson Danny (Fred Hechinger) to drive her around and help her with the computer and phone. One day, she receives and falls for a scam caller impersonating Danny in trouble and sends $10,000 before learning it was false. Angered and embarrassed, she resolves to track down the scammer and get her money back, recruiting to help her an old friend Ben (Richard Roundtree in his last performance).
The film is written and directed by Josh Margolin in his movie debut, and is loosely based on an experience his own grandmother, also called Thelma, had when a scammer attempted to extort her. It's a good, sympathetic hook for a revenge comedy that Margolin handles with a light though artful touch. Much as he takes advantage of the inherent humour in the premise, he does not exploit his subject; nor does he play excessively into bald stereotypes of the elderly. What jokes do come at their expense seem way more observational in nature, like Thelma's effort to post a nice comment on a YouTube video, or the running gag of her encountering other elderly women and the conversational determination of whether they know each other or not. It's a humour that largely avoids cliché, is smartly written, based in reality and demonstrates an honest affection for Thelma, Ben, and their contemporaries.
There's also a playfulness with which it takes to the action-thriller connotations of its storytelling. A lesser movie might showcase its send-up through technical subversion -by achieving through special effects a hyper-competent stunt-performing stamina on Thelma's part that fabricates her tangibility for the sake of a central joke. But Margolin knows how cheap, insincere, and ultimately dull that would be. It's way more interesting to play Thelma as she is. It’s not about an old lady being given intense action scenes, it’s about applying the rules of action scenes to an old lady’s context. And this can be very fun -like when the camera spins around Thelma and Ben from different angles as in a Michael Bay movie, or when it utilizes split-screens in a very Mission: Impossible (a film that is seen to directly inspire Thelma) kind of style to show Thelma diverting her family. Action does need to be adjusted given the advanced age of these stars, but the movie still takes such beats seriously, as when Thelma does a roll off a couch while sneaking through an antiques shop not to set off the alarm. And my favourite is a sequence where completing an e-transfer is played with exactly the technical and narrative weight of a hacker scene. The scooter that they use is quite prominent -itself certainly a gag, but also a tool for this function -allowing Squibb to more easily be a part of cooler-looking scenarios. And Margolin does his best to relate them that way.
As much as the movie is about Thelma, it focuses a fair bit of time on Danny too -both his relationship with Thelma and the crippling insecurity of his lack of motivation in life. He's been drifting as a layabout and there is something intriguing to how he sees his relationship to Thelma as the one area of his life where he has a sense of control and authority; but it is often the dryer territory of the film, a halt in momentum that doesn't have the dramatic juice to justify itself. The other side to Danny's character, his sombre feelings around the knowledge his grandmother doesn't have many years left has greater emotional resonance, though it's not developed much beyond platitude.
The family is enjoyable enough, with an excellent Parker Posey as Danny's erratic mother (and Thelma's daughter) and Clark Gregg as his sarcastic doofus father -both written with vividly authentic humour. The heart of the story is Roundtree, acting beautifully as Thelma's counterpoint conscience and foil. And you really come to invest in Ben and those little delights he has left to take stock of, such as his role of Daddy Warbucks in his senior's home rendition of Annie. This is also a film that gives Roundtree one last chance to hold an evil white guy at gunpoint -truly a worthy final performance.
But of course the key to Thelma's effect does come back to Squibb and her exceptionally quaint yet zealous performance. With her inauspicious folksy attitude and excellent comic timing, she handily carries the movie with an earnest conviction that no other actress her age could muster. Ten years ago this movie would have been made with Betty White -and much as I loved White she wouldn't be nearly as good as Squibb for what the script requires. Because there's no glamour or prestige to June Squibb, her mannerisms haven't a trace of artificiality -she's grounded in a way that the industry legends are not, looking like she could be anyone's grandma. Squibb and Margolin alike take full advantage of this, creating a more palpable character out of it while also allowing Squibb to demonstrate her strengths of humour and a natural pathos.
There's one scene at the end of the second act that is mildly traumatic, where Thelma is on her own, shuffling through an urban field at night -the horrifying reality of seniors wandering off alone having already been established- and she trips and falls, from which she can't get up on her own. Objectively, it's a minor beat, but it feels so devastating; and it all comes down to Squibb's effortless realism and Margolin's direct understanding of how to relate his movie. Thelma doesn't break ground at all (apart from when she hits it), but it does play well within the bounds it sets, forcing its audience to consider the creative ways action movie language can be applied, and showcasing the limits of ageism -something that Squibb, who has openly defied her age time and again, must certainly be proud of.
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