Thelma & Louise

Thelma & Louise
theatrical release poster
Directed by	Ridley Scott
Produced by	Mimi Polk Gitlin Ridley Scott
Written by	Callie Khouri
Starring	Susan Sarandon Geena Davis Harvey Keitel Brad Pitt Michael Madsen Christopher McDonald
Music by	Hans Zimmer
Cinematography	Adrian Biddle
Editing by	Thom Noble
Studio	Pathé Entertainment Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Distributed by	Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (Sony Pictures Entertainment)
Release date(s)	May 24, 1991 (1991-05-24) (US)
Running time	129 minutes
Country	United States France
Language	English
Budget	$16.5 million
Box office	US$45,360,915 (US)

Thelma & Louise is a 1991 film co-produced and directed by Ridley Scott and written by Callie Khouri, the film's plot revolves around Thelma and Louise's escape from their troubled and caged lives. It stars Geena Davis as Thelma and Susan Sarandon as Louise, and co-stars Harvey Keitel as a sympathetic detective trying to trace them as they go on the run after killing a rapist. Michael Madsen plays the role of Louise's boyfriend. Brad Pitt (in one of his first significant film roles) plays a robber out on parole.

Thelma & Louise became an instant critical and commercial success, receiving six Academy Award nominations and winning one for Best Original Screenplay (Khouri). Both Sarandon and Davis were nominated for their roles in the same category, Academy Award for Best Actress. However, the two lost the award to Jodie Foster for her role in The Silence of the Lambs.

Plot

Thelma Dickinson (Geena Davis) is a passive, goofy housewife, married to a controlling husband, Darryl (Christopher McDonald). Louise Sawyer (Susan Sarandon) is a single waitress who appears strong, organized and stern, with some unspecified trauma in her past. The two friends head out in Louise's teal 1966 Thunderbird convertible for a two-day vacation of fishing in the mountains that quickly turns into a nightmarish situation before they even reach their destination, but which sees them change from victims of circumstance into outlaw heroines of the road.

They stop for a drink at the Silver Bullet, a roadside cowboy bar and dancehall, where Thelma meets a man called Harlan Puckett (Timothy Carhart), with whom she dances. She gets drunk and the man attempts to rape her in the parking lot. Louise finds them and threatens to shoot Harlan if he does not stop, using a gun Thelma brought with her. Harlan stops, but as the women walk away, he yells profanity and insults at them. Louise loses her temper and shoots Harlan, killing him. Thelma wants to go to the police right away, but Louise says that because Thelma was drunk and had been dancing with Harlan, no one will believe he was trying to rape her. Afraid that the authorities will prosecute her, Louise decides to run away, and Thelma accompanies her.

Louise is determined to reach Mexico but refuses to go through Texas, despite the fact that they are in Oklahoma and the fastest route to Mexico leads through Texas. It is revealed that something bad happened to Louise in Texas years earlier, though Louise refuses to say exactly what it was, but it makes her terrified to be arrested in Texas. They flee west and on the way they meet a handsome, charming young man, J.D. (Brad Pitt), whom Thelma immediately likes. She convinces Louise to let him hitch a ride with them. Louise, meanwhile, contacts her boyfriend Jimmy Lennox (Michael Madsen) and asks him to send her life savings via Western Union. When she goes to pick it up, she discovers that Jimmy has come to see her in person. They go to talk in his room while Thelma guards the money. Thelma invites J.D. into her room; it turns out that he is a robber who has broken his parole. He and Thelma become intimate, and Thelma experiences a sexual awakening. During their time together, J.D. describes how he conducted his hold-ups. Meanwhile, Jimmy asks Louise to marry him, and she refuses, as well as refusing to tell him what is going on. They spend the night together.

In the morning after he has left, Thelma tells Louise about her night with J.D. Suddenly Louise asks where J.D. is, and they find that both J.D. and the money are gone. Louise is distraught and has become frozen with indecision, so a guilty Thelma steps up and takes charge. Meanwhile, the FBI has been tracking them, and after separately questioning J.D., Jimmy, and Darryl, begin putting the pieces together and are getting closer to catching the fugitives. Detective Hal Slocumb (Harvey Keitel) discovers the event that Louise experienced in Texas that has made her so terrified of being taken into police custody, and he expresses sympathy for her predicament and pledges to protect her. During a couple of brief phone conversations, Slocumb appears to genuinely be concerned about helping Louise, yet he is unsuccessful in his attempts to persuade her to surrender.

View of the Colorado River and Dead Horse Point, the location of filming of the last scene

Their actions continue to spiral out of control as the two of them make their way across the country, while Thelma sheds her giggly, goofy personality for a focused, aggressive, hard-drinking one. While Louise waits in the car, Thelma, in an attempt to make up for some of the money J.D. stole, makes use of what he taught her to rob a convenience store. When a policeman (Jason Beghe) stops them for speeding, Thelma threatens the policeman with her gun, steals his gun, and locks him in the trunk of his cruiser. (In a later comic interlude, he is freed by a mountain-biking Rastafarian (Noel L. Walcott III).) They encounter a truck driver (Marco St. John) who repeatedly makes obscene sexual gestures at them on the road. They pull over to demand an apology from him, but when he refuses, they fire their pistols at the truck's fuel tank, causing it to explode.

Thelma and Louise are finally cornered by police only about 100 yards from the edge of the Grand Canyon. Detective Slocumb arrives on the scene and protests that the law enforcement response is too heavy, but he is refused the chance to make one last attempt to talk the women into surrendering themselves. Rather than be captured and spend the rest of their lives in jail, Thelma proposes that they keep going, implying that they end their lives by driving over the edge and into the canyon. Louise initially doesn't understand, and Thelma repeats herself. Louise smiles and asks Thelma if she is certain, and Thelma replies yes. Louise pulls Thelma to her and kisses her and then she stomps on the gas. Slocumb recognizes what is happening as soon as the car starts forward, and he sprints after the women in a desperate effort to save them. The film ends with the car driving over the cliff and flying through the air. End credits begin over a montage of their happier moments together during the weekend.

Cast

• Susan Sarandon as Louise Elizabeth Sawyer
• Geena Davis as Thelma Yvonne Dickinson
• Harvey Keitel as Detective Hal Slocumb
• Michael Madsen as Jimmy Lennox
• Christopher McDonald as Darryl Dickinson
• Stephen Tobolowsky as Max
• Brad Pitt as J.D.
• Timothy Carhart as Harlan Puckett
• Jason Beghe as State Trooper
• Marco St. John as Truck Driver

Production

The role of Louise was originally intended to be played by a younger star: Annie Potts, Holly Hunter, Michelle Pfeiffer, Frances McDormand, Sela Ward, Jennifer Jason Leigh or Meg Ryan. Pfeiffer agreed to sign on, but dropped due to script concerns. Melanie Griffith was approached to star as Louise, but she became pregnant before filming began. Eventually the choice was made to age the character, and after Goldie Hawn, Diane Keaton, Sigourney Weaver, Sissy Spacek, Anjelica Huston and Tina Turner declined, Susan Sarandon was hired for the part.^{[citation needed]}

Although the setting for the film is a fictional route between Arkansas and the Grand Canyon, the movie was filmed almost entirely in the states of California and Utah. The primary filming locations for the movie are rural areas around Bakersfield, California and Moab, Utah. The Grand Canyon scenes were actually filmed just south of Dead Horse Point State Park in Utah.

Soundtrack

In addition to Glenn Frey's "Part of Me, Part of You", which became the film's primary theme song, the soundtrack also included performances by Charlie Sexton, Grayson Hugh, Martha and the Vandellas, Toni Childs, Marianne Faithfull, B.B. King, and Michael McDonald.

Reception

The film was a critical success. Metacritic.com, lists a composite critical score of 88 out of 100, the Metacritic 90th best reviewed movie of all time. Rotten Tomatoes rates Thelma & Louise 92% Fresh. Janet Maslin of The New York Times, like many other critics, had only praise for the film in her 1992 review: "Mr. Scott's Thelma and Louise, with a sparkling screenplay by the first-time writer Callie Khouri, is a surprise on this and many other scores. It reveals the previously untapped talent of Mr. Scott (best known for majestically moody action films like Alien, Blade Runner and Black Rain) for exuberant comedy, and for vibrant American imagery, notwithstanding his English roots. It reimagines the buddy film with such freshness and vigor that the genre seems positively new. It discovers unexpected resources in both its stars, Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis, who are perfectly teamed as the spirited and original title characters." Roger Ebert also praises the film, but withholds a perfect score on the basis of "the last shot before the titles begin. It's a freeze frame that fades to white, which is fine, except it does so with unseemly haste... It's unsettling to get involved in a movie that takes 128 minutes to bring you to a payoff that the filmmakers seem to fear."

The film was screened out of competition at the 1991 Cannes Film Festival.

After watching this film, singer-songwriter Tori Amos wrote "Me and a Gun", the story of her rape six years earlier, which she had told no one about before watching this film. Triggered by a scene in the movie, Amos began sobbing publicly in a crowded movie theater and writing the lyrics to the song in her head.

The final scene, where the two embrace each other before driving off a cliff, has become an iconic scene. Numerous homages and parodies of this scene have appeared through the years, including alternate movie endings, cartoon parodies, and as a tragic ending to television series, music videos and commercials.

The film also received significant criticism from those who thought it was "male-bashing" and "man-hating" and that its depictions of men were unfairly negative.

Feminism

Numerous critics and writers have remarked on the feminist overtones of Thelma & Louise. Film critic B. Ruby Rich praises the film as an uncompromising validation of women's experiences, while Kenneth Turan calls it a "neo-feminist road movie". In her essay "The Daughters of Thelma and Louise", Jessica Enevold argues that the movie constitutes "an attack on conventional patterns of chauvinist male behavior toward females". In addition, it "exposes the traditional stereotyping of male-female relationships" while rescripting the typical gender roles of the road movie genre. In her review for The Los Angeles Times, film critic Sheila Benson, however, objects to the characterization of Thelma & Louise as feminist, arguing that the movie is more preoccupied with revenge and violence than feminist values.

Awards and honors

Khouri won an Academy Award for Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen; Scott, Davis, Sarandon, cinematographer Adrian Biddle, and film editor Thom Noble were nominated for Oscars.

Year	Award	Category	Nominee	Result
1991	César Award	Best Foreign Film	Thelma & Louise	Nominated
1991	Directors Guild of America Award	Best Director - Motion Picture	Ridley Scott	Nominated
1992	Academy Awards	Best Director	Ridley Scott	Nominated
		Best Actress	Geena Davis	Nominated
		Best Actress	Susan Sarandon	Nominated
		Best Original Screenplay	Callie Khouri	Won
		Best Cinematography	Adrian Biddle	Nominated
		Best Film Editing	Thom Noble	Nominated
1992	Golden Globes	Best Motion Picture - Drama	Thelma & Louise	Nominated
		Best Actress - Drama	Geena Davis	Nominated
		Best Actress - Drama	Susan Sarandon	Nominated
		Best Screenplay - Motion Picture	Callie Khouri	Won

The British Film Institute published a book about the film in 2000, as part of a Modern Classics series. On the Writers Guild of America Award's 101 Best Screenplays List it made #72. The film was ranked on the Australian program 20 to 1, in the episode Magnificent Movie Moments.

American Film Institute Lists

• AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies - Nominated
• AFI's 100 Years...100 Thrills - #76
• AFI's 100 Years...100 Heroes and Villains:
  • Thelma Dickinson & Louise Sawyer - #24 Heroes
• AFI's 100 Years...100 Cheers - #78
• AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies (10th Anniversary Edition) - Nominated

Books

• Thelma & Louise and Women in Hollywood by Gina Fournier (McFarland & Co., Inc. Publishers, 2007)
• Thelma & Louise Live! The Cultural Afterlife of an American Film, Bernie Cook, Ed. (The University of Texas Press, 2007)
• Thelma & Louise, Marita Sturken (BFI Publishing, 2000)

References

Notes

External links

• Thelma & Louise at the Internet Movie Database
• Thelma & Louise at AllRovi
• Thelma & Louise at the TCM Movie Database
• Thelma & Louise at Rotten Tomatoes
• Thelma & Louise at Box Office Mojo