With my best friend, I saw “Thelma” from writer and director Josh Margolin and starring June Squibb, Richard Roundtree, Parker Posey, Clark Gregg, and Fred Hechinger. On leaving the theater we both agreed that it was a very fun but very slight movie that we were glad we saw but were sure would not be among the best of the year. After having a full day plus a few hours to allow the movie to marinate in my mind, however, I may have to amend that statement as, like the very best movies tend to do, it’s staying with me and the more I think on it the more I recognize that it did something truly unique, something I can’t recall ever seeing before in a movie, and that’s treating the topic of old age and older characters specifically in a manner that’s simultaneously very true to life and dramatic.
“Thelma” accomplishes this by keeping the story very simple. Thelma is a 94-year-old grandmother who is taken in by a scam in which people pretending to be her grandson get her to mail them $10,000. The movie’s storyline follows her determined effort to find the scammers and get her money back as her family tries to protect her, though they have no idea what she’s up to they just know she was acting strangely shortly before disappearing while visiting a friend at a nursing home. There are a number of things that make this story work. The cast had excellent chemistry and seemed to be having a wonderful time which they pass on to the audience, the soundtrack is an inspired series of instrumental tracks that sound like something straight out of Lawrence Whelk if he was covering the Mission Impossible theme, but what’s most important is that “Thelma” has genuine insight into what it is to be elderly without either judging the elderly themselves nor glamorizing them.
The trials and tribulations June Squibb’s Thelma and Richard Roundtree’s Ben undertake in the retrieval of her stolen money are never over the top. It’s not car chases and gun fights with the elderly taking part, it’s the difficulty of reaching something on the top shelf when your back and leg muscles have long since fallen into decrepitude. It’s trying to network when most of your friends are dead or senile. It’s trying to travel when can’t see or hear well without some form of aid and you can’t stand up again if you fall over. It’s about the realities of trying to accomplish something difficult when you’re advanced in age and you either can’t get or don’t want help.
So, it’s the tone that is what really makes “Thelma” a special movie. This isn’t a movie that treats old age as a time of wistfulness or depression nor as a source of feel-good humor, but instead just shows what an unusual but not overly so day in the life of an elderly woman is like and allows all humor and drama to come straight from the well-written characters and streamlined plot instead of a director’s musings on the nobility and tragedy of old age. “Thelma” seems slight but fun, until you have time to think on it and realize what made it seem slight was the very thing that gives it actual gravitas, its complete lack of pretension leading to a real, unfiltered examination of old age which still manages to be exciting and funny.
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