Thelma
“Aging and disability often go hand in hand, and Josh Margolin easily works that fact into Thelma, leveraging it for power and humor.”
Title: Thelma (2024)
Director: Josh Margolin 👨🏼🇺🇸
Writer: Josh Margolin 👨🏼🇺🇸
Reviewed by Li 👩🏻🇺🇸
Technical: 3.5/5
Stylish caper Thelma, which just premiered to an appreciative Sundance Film Festival audience this evening, follows the titular 93-year-old hero (June Squibb) who strikes off on a perilous journey to recover the $10,000 she’d been scammed out of. With lively music and comedic sequences that riff on spy and heist movies, Josh Margolin’s feel-good feature debut lets viewers quickly sink into a cozy film that they know will turn out fine. Less an adage on life and death, and more a celebration of independence and cherishing your loved ones, Thelma doesn’t present anything profound or original, but it’s enjoyable all the same.
Gender: 4.5/5
Does it pass the Bechdel Test? YES
The movie follows Thelma every step of the way, ensuring that a female protagonist dominates the screen. But the key relationships explored in the film revolve around men: She has a warm and loving bond with her grandson Daniel (Fred Hechinger), and she reconnects with an old friend, Ben (played by the late Richard Roundtree), who becomes her willing partner-in-crime.
In a supporting role, we meet Thelma’s daughter Gail (Parker Posey), who’s mainly used as a helicoptering, anxious foil to Thelma’s stubborn nonchalance. A few female friends share scenes with the lead as well, but the narrative doesn’t branch out too far, keeping Thelma’s relationships with male characters—and with herself, yes—top of mind as she sets out to achieve the seemingly impossible.
Race: 3.5/5
Thelma marks the final film for Roundtree, who passed away in October 2023, leaving behind an incredible acting career that includes the iconic lead role of the Shaft movie and TV franchise of the 1970s. Here, his character is a warm, confident, and wise friend. Ben has accepted his need for assisted living and happily spends his time taking painting classes and acting in stage productions attended mostly by loved ones. Even though he doesn’t experience any major transformation, he does get a bit of backstory, as Thelma and Ben discuss what their lives have been like after their spouses passed away.
But outside of Roundtree’s role, the film mainly follows Thelma’s white family—her daughter Gail, Gail’s husband Alan (Clark Gregg), and their son Daniel. In a minor role, a worker at Ben’s assisted living home, Rochelle (Nicole Byer), is a Black woman, but she only has a handful of lines.
Bonus for Age: +1.00
After more than 70 years of acting on stage and in movies, 93-year-old Squibb finally gets her first leading role. The very premise of Thelma revolves around giving humanity to adults whose aging bodies have begun to slow down. In his director’s note, Margolin discusses his own grandmother as the inspiration for the film: “The inevitability of losing her has become increasingly real to me, and so has her dogged persistence to hold on to her sense of self … I wrote Thelma from this place of reckoning. I wanted to explore her fight for what’s left of her autonomy.”
Bonus for Disability: +0.50
Aging and disability often go hand in hand, and Margolin easily works that fact into his script, leveraging it for power and humor. He shows how assistive devices can be used creatively: Thelma hands Ben one of her hearing aids so that he can listen in when she confronts her scammers. Disability can also be a liability; when Thelma falls down in a remote field, it’s a serious issue and, with her diminished strength, she needs help getting back up on her feet. “I want the audience to feel these challenges viscerally,” Margolin says in his notes to the press, “never making light of the strength it takes for her to move through the world.” His film translates those challenges incredibly well and brought up memories of my own mother, who also needs substantial help, time, and care to get from place to place. Movies like this not only bring to life such quotidian burdens—they add levity and humor, its own kind of medicine.
Mediaversity Grade: B+ 4.33/5
Without nearly enough movies, and hardly any action comedies, that star people in their 90s, Thelma is a wonderful, lighthearted caper to put on for the whole family.
Like Thelma? Try these other comedies starring women over 60.
Lucky Grandma (2019)
The Miracle Club (2023)
Problemista (2023)