She's old but don't mess with her

 

Jane Squibb,  the 94 year old actress who made a big-screen mark in Alexander Payne's 2013 film Nebraska, lands a starring role in Thelma, a movie centered on characters lucky enough to live into their 90s.  

   Although the movie begins with a serious problem (older people being bilked by unscrupulous phone callers), director Josh Margolin veers off into a Los Angeles-based caper comedy in which Squibb’s Thelma takes matters into her own hands. She pursues the swindler. 

   To conduct her search, Thelma commandeers a scooter — really a motorized wheelchair — from a friend  (Richard Roundtree) who resides in an assisted living facility. Roundtree’s Ben grudgingly joins Thelma on her quest. 

     Margolin jams the movie’s aging stars into a scenario in which they battle their infirmities while heading toward the confrontation that serves as the movie’s climax and provides a late-picture role for Malcolm McDowell. The screenplay also contrives to put a gun in Thelma’s hands.

    Fred Hechinger plays Thelma's feckless grandson, a young man in need of an ego boost. Parker Posey signs on as Thelma's daughter with Clark Gregg playing her son-in-law.

    The scam begins when Thelma receives a phone call saying that her grandson has been in a terrible automobile accident and needs $10,000 for a lawyer. In a panic, she  mails the money to a post office box. 

     Thelma makes a few nods toward the grief of losing family and friends as old age encroaches. Margolin also plays with action movie tropes, but mostly the movie proceeds as a lightweight trifle built around two strong performances that feel more credible than the plot. 

     In sum: three cheers for the plucky, engaging Squibb and for the dignified and still charismatic Roundtree. Two for the rest of the movie. Thelma marks Roundtree's last big-screen performance. The actor died in 2023.

She has powers she can't control

There are few new stories, only new ways to tell them. That may be important to remember as you watch Norwegian director Joachim Trier's Thelma, a coming-of-age tale in which Thelma, a first-year college student played by Eili Harboe, learns about the power of sexual desire. Thelma's separation from her parents (Henrik Rafaelsen and Ellen Dorrit Petersen) creates the situation in which her emerging sexuality bumps against the walls of repression established by her religious mother and father. Trier's chilly style fills the screen with images that rattle Thelma and us along with her. Some of these images occur during the seizures Thelma begins to have. Doctors can't pinpoint any cause for Thelma's distress, which seems to be exacerbated by her burgeoning friendship and sexual attraction to another coed (Kaya Wilkins). Eerie and full of disturbing sights, Trier's movie proves engaging enough to squelch criticisms that might arise from a plot that many have compared, with some justification, to that of Carrie. Whatever you make of Thelma, it's difficult to ignore Trier's ability to unsettle an audience. Besides, Harboe ably suggests a woman on the precipice of terrifying discoveries. Together, Trier and Harboe create a state of sustained unease that penetrates nearly every frame of the movie, and Thelma becomes a movie that's not so much about telling a story as about creating a world that matches Thelma's interior life. Thelma grapples with a mysterious force that she hardly comprehends but must learn to accommodate. Is this force a psychological response to religious repression? Is it something real or something imagined? Can Thelma really make things happen in the world external to herself? Trier wisely leaves us looking for answers, giving Thelma a feeling of tantalizing ambiguity.