Thelma & Louise (1991)

Saw Thelma & Louise (1991), a very fun wish fulfillment film about two women who have been beaten down by conventional life.  Louise is a tough waitress who is dissatisfied and mostly ignored.  Thelma is a housewife to a man who clearly regards her as property: the trophy wife whose job it is to stay home and be shouted at.  So they head out of town on for a change but one of the women is sexually assaulted and her assailant is shot in the heart, and the two women are suddenly deep on the wrong side of the law.  At first they're utterly panicked about the loss of their old lives, but from the ashes of that old life rises a new sense of possibility and purpose which is lovely to behold.

The film is tragic in parts, but mostly uplifting.  It's a feminist revenge fantasy: the ignored and belittled woman finally striking back against the world, forcing their way through it for once.  It's a little on-the-nose in a few scenes however.  There's a scene where the cops are urging Thelma's husband, Jimmy, to keep Thelma talking for as long as possible: "If she calls, just be gentle. You know, like, you're really happy to hear from her. Like you really miss her. Women love that shit."  Jimmy grins and laughs at this truism.  Later on, as the film is near its end, we close up on Thelma's husband who is sitting, stricken and aghast, listening to the cops closing in on her.  This is supposed to be a cathartic scene where the asshole husband finally sees the error of his ways, but this is too sudden, too unbelievable to me.

My understanding is that people are cruel because they lack empathy.  They don't recover their empathy when they hear about criminal activity, they hang on to that to justify their own lazy indifference.  Similarly, there's a sort of head cop is in charge of the investigation and many times he begs his superiors for clemency for the two outlaw ladies.  Again, this doesn't ring true for me.  We're supposed to believe that these cops feel sympathy for these criminals?  My understanding is that cop-ing is very for-or-against.  The only sympathy is deployed as a means to capture.

But this isn't supposed to be a cop procedural or a documentary.  This is supposed to fill us with a sense that we too can break out of the dissatisfying lives we've trapped ourselves inside of, and that yes it will be scary and it will probably be a disaster, but it's still possible to try and it can be good.  It is an uplifting movie, even though we know it ends with that iconic plunge into the Grand Canyon.