Thelma: June Squibb stars as a senior-citizen action hero in this late career highlight
A 93-year-old grandmother takes matters into her own hands when she’s duped by a small-time scammer in this pleasant feelgood film that underutilises the comic potential of its nonagenarian protagonist.
Just a few months after Jason Statham stood up for helpless old ladies against telephone scammers in The Beekeeper, the light and gentle Thelma offers a similar set-up with a different kind of wish-fulfillment fantasy: the grandma who fights back.
Our protagonist is a 93-year-old widow whose days are enlivened by visits from her doting grandson (Fred Hechinger). Both generations are subject to the overbearing concern of Thelma’s daughter (Parker Posey) and her husband (Clark Gregg), who are pushing for a nursing home for grandma and a career path for son. Her quiet life is disrupted when she is tricked out of $10,000 by a small-time fraud operation led by a sneering Malcolm McDowell; rather than accept that time has made her vulnerable, she takes cheeky inspiration from another ageing daredevil, Tom Cruise (her grandson’s favourite film star) and becomes a nonagenarian action hero.
The film is built on the comic sight of Thelma and her elderly best friend (Richard Roundtree) trawling Los Angeles on the back of a motorised scooter – an image of senior-citizen resourcefulness that faintly recalls David Lynch’s The Straight Story (1999). And as far as one-long-night descents into urban hellscapes go, Good Time (2017) this is not. Thelma finds herself in only modest danger (even the climactic confrontation with McDowell is low-key), and writer/director Josh Margolin seems uninterested in the comic possibilities of pitting these charismatic pensioners against the seamier side of nocturnal L.A. – although David Bolen’s digital cinematography does render the dreary inner-city backstreets as evocatively unglamorous backdrops.
The film also stays emotionally grounded in the relationships between Thelma and her family, giving the characters enough space to like and care for each other. When the closing credits feature home-movie footage of Margolin’s real grandmother, also named Thelma, it can’t help but be affecting.
Thelma is the kind of pleasant entertainment for older audiences that has traditionally kept art houses in business outside of Oscar season. Beyond that, a big selling point of movies like this is the opportunity to see neglected or underappreciated performers of a certain age given fulsome showcases. McDowell and the late Roundtree are welcome presences in showy supporting roles, and this is a career highlight for June Squibb, 93 at the time of filming. A prolific stage and (beginning with her role in Woody Allen’s 1990 film Alice at age 61) late-blooming screen character actor, she has busily specialised in playing kindly older women like Jack Nicholson’s wife in About Schmidt (2002) and Adam Sandler’s mom in Hubie Halloween (2020). She’s nicely understated here, trusting the innate sweetness of her screen presence and, like the movie around her, resisting any urge to play the high-concept premise too broadly.
► Thelma is in UK cinemas now.