THELMA AND LOUISE
A film review by Dave Gross
Copyright 1991 Dave Gross
I'm willing to let a lot of things I disagree with slide for the sake of art. For instance, I despise racism, but I won't overly criticize a joke that depends on racial stereotypes -- as long as the joke is funny. Most of those sort of jokes aren't funny at all, though, so rarely to I have this opportunity to rein in my social conscience.
This was the attitude with which I approached THELMA AND LOUISE. I had heard enough about the film to know that it quite possibly would violate quite a bit of the men's movement's version of politically correct thought. I was willing to let these considerations take a back seat to the art of the movie.
For a while, that worked out fine. The movie wasn't too cerebral, but sort of fell into the old suburban action fantasy Walter Mitty thing. You know ... the "Gee my life is boring, wouldn't it be exciting if ..." sketch. Not at all foreign to film. Ad executive finds himself in the middle of a terrorist plot; Housewife gets mistaken for daughter of millionaire, madcap adventure erupts upon being snatched by Keystone Kidnappers; Ordinary caring father dons super-hero garb to take vengeance on criminal element. We've seen this sort of thing before.
And certainly there have been a number of movies about men who have gone beyond the law, using violence to terrorize the countryside and cash in on macho derring do. ROBIN HOOD, coming out this summer, will probably fall into this mold. Look for enough murder and armed robbery in this one to far outshine the criminal mayhem in THELMA AND LOUISE.
But, unfortunately for the film's fate in this review, the quality just isn't very good, which meant that I had time to start thinking politics.
It's true, I noticed right away, that the men in the film are mostly reeking of the slime from the depths from which they have crawled. I didn't immediately fault the film for this, since the only real female roles in the film were the title characters, and I didn't think they represented wonderful examples of the species, either.
I could talk about some of the reasons why I didn't think the film or the story were very good. One of the main flaws, I thought, was with the characters. It seemed to me that the plot wasn't something that they did, so much as something that happened to them. And their epiphanal sayings every time they committed some violent act made me wonder if these wonderful things they were discovering about themselves or about life didn't really add up to much more than an adrenaline rush -- explanations didn't get much deeper than that.
But seeing as this is soc.men, not talk.movies or whatever [well, it was soc.men before -Moderator], I won't go into my ideas of what made the film flawed as a film. I will talk a little about the images of men and women in the film.
As I mentioned before, there are few truly heroic figures in the film, unless you count Thelma and Louise themselves (I don't). There is one boyfriend who isn't entirely seedy, at least as far as we can tell through his cold exterior. And there is the Good Cop (tm) whose motivations for his understanding behavior are left completely unexplained by the film. The incidental men in the film are all scum, from the rapist at the bar to the leering men at the rest stops to the repulsive cardboard-cut-out chauvinist pig truck driver to the idiot repressive husband to the sloppy restaurant boss to the guy who was a good lay but robbed them blind when they turned their backs -- They drool, cackle, bully and generally act like stereotypes throughout the film.
This is not such a horrible crime in itself, since as I mentioned before, the two main female characters are also not the sort of people I'd choose to spend time with. I can't think of any other female characters in the film who even warranted speaking roles (other than maybe "Some more coffee?"), so it's hard to say whether this was just equal opportunity misanthropy.
So for a while, the film is pretty fair-minded. Then about two-thirds of the way through, things start getting preachy. If you didn't realize that this was supposed to be a women's liberation film, you learn fast. The preachy stage reaches its peak when Thelma and Louise manage to get the aforementioned truck driver to pull over. He expects that his frontal assault of sexual innuendo has miraculously done the trick, but is stunned to be confronted by two women who castigate him for his sexist behavior ("How would you like it if somebody said that to your mother?") and then, when he refuses to apologize, blow up his truck.
It gets spread pretty thickly at this point, and drove the nails in the coffin for the film, in my opinion. But don't decide not to see the film because it is anti-male and a poor representation of liberated women. Decide not to see the film because it isn't a good film. Or I suppose you can find out for yourself, but go on bargain night :-)
-- =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- dgross@polyslo.CalPoly.EDU -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
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