Actress June Squibb is, according to Wikipedia, 94 years old. She has a career going back decades. And somehow, it took until 2024 for a movie to come out with her in the lead. How was that possible? I don’t know, but I generally found her a welcome addition to, oh, anything. That includes a small role in Inside Out 2 where she voiced Nostaligia. But somehow, no lead roles until Thelma, a movie from writer/director Josh Margolin based on an incident involving his own grandmother (also named Thelma). I was thinking I would see it as one of my catch-up movies, but the clincher was that my AMC app listed its genre as “action.”
An action movie starring a 94 year old actress in her first leading role? Yeah, that was an easy pick.
Thelma Post (Squibb) is a 93 year old widow, living on her own for two years and greatly valuing her independence. She has a close relationship with her adult grandson Danny (Fred Hechinger), but then one day she gets a call from someone claiming to be Danny, saying he’s been in an accident, and then a lawyer calls saying he needs her to mail $10,000 cash to get the youth out of jail. Panicked, Thelma sends the money and finally gets a hold of her daughter Gail (Parker Posey) and son-in-law Alan (Clark Gregg) only for the three to soon discover Danny is fine. He was sleeping in and missing their calls, but there is one problem: Thelma has already sent the money. This leads Gail and Alan to question whether someone needs to keep a closer eye on her than she has been, and Thelma, she doesn’t care for that much. She’s going to have to get that money back herself.
What follows is an action movie of a sort, but one that fits the slow movements and trod that Thelma makes as she goes about her business. She soon acquires a partner in the form of old friend Ben (the late Richard Roundtree), a nursing home resident who finds that life comfortable and in complete contrast to the more independent-minded Thelma. Ben does come with certain advantages: unlike most of Thelma’s friends, he’s still alive and hasn’t moved, and he has a two passenger electric scooter to make getting around easier. Beyond that, Thelma needs to find the people who scammed her out of her money, all without letting her well-meaning family or the police know because, well, she wants to do this on her own.
As I said, this is in many ways an action movie. Her partner is, after all, Shaft, and her ultimate nemesis is played by Malcolm McDowell. Squibb never really gets up to a full run or anything, and the movie makes a point where it seems one of Thelma’s inspirations to do this herself is that Tom Cruise still does his own stunts. Furthermore, the movie’s editing does work like many an action movie, creating tension by simply showing her trying to go up some stairs or walk around a cramped room without getting caught. But this movie is often quite funny in its own right, and rarely does so in ways that seem typical for an “old person does stuff” comedy. Thelma’s aging (like every other elderly character in the movie) is played more or less straight.
That’s actually one of the things that makes the movie what it is. Thelma may be slow and bad with computers, but she’s not an idiot, and some of her habits and skills actually come in handy over the course of the run time. But I think the movie is at its best when its either showing how sad the lives of the elderly can be or outright celebrating Thelma as a character. There’s a scene where Thelma and Ben go to visit a mutual friend, a woman who lives alone and doesn’t seem to understand much of what’s going on. It seems to be played broadly for laughs given what Thelma is even doing there as part of her mission, but at the end of the scene, there’s a sad feeling that this woman lives alone and doesn’t seem to have any company. Thelma does a marvelous job of showing what life is like for old folks, whether it’s nursing home life, the desire for independence, loneliness, or just medical conditions no one seems to know how to deal with. One nice touch is how the movie’s background noise always gets dimmer when Thelma takes her hearing aids out. I got a movie that thrilled me, made me laugh out loud, moved me, and made me think a bit. In other words, Thelma did everything I wanted it to do and then did a bit more.
Grade: A
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